A Small Death in Lisbon. Robert Thomas Wilson

Eva from a different angle sizing all the sentences, all the phrases, weighing every word she’d ever said to him and all the ones she hadn’t as well, which was a bigger task because Eva was a between-the-lines talker. She left the sayable unsaid and said what she meant without saying it.

      He played over the scene of the first time she ended up in his bed after four years of knowing each other, after four years of being friends. She’d sat astride him in her black silk stockings and suspenders running her hands over and over his chest.

      ‘Why?’ he’d asked.

      ‘Why what?’

      ‘After all these years . . . why are you here?’

      She’d pursed her lips and looked at him out of the corner of her face measuring the question for its long-term prospects. Then she’d suddenly gripped his penis with both hands and said:

      ‘Because of your big Swabian cock.’

      They’d laughed. It hadn’t been it, but it would do.

      Now as he came to that point, for the hundredth time, where Eva had diminished him, he all but writhed in his seat with the torment of his sexual jealousy. He saw the heavy-waisted, pink-skinned, uncontoured-buttocked Gruppenführer squeezing and pumping between her slim white thighs, her heels encouraging him, her breath coming out in jolts, his trembling grunts into the corner of her neck, her clawing fingers on his flabby back, his greedy hands, her rising knees, his deeper thrusts . . . Felsen would shake his head. No. And he would go back to Eva again sitting astride him in her black . . . Why?

      ‘Power does it for the ladies,’ Lehrer’s chauffeur had said, ‘even Himmler . . .’ That’s what Felsen had thought as he watched Lehrer eat his breakfast the morning after he’d seen him in the club with Eva. That’s what he’d thought as he strolled through the dark morning to the Swiss National Bank, as he’d signed the release documents, as he’d supervised the loading of the gold, as he’d shaken hands with Lehrer and watched him walk back to the Schweizerhof, to his three days in Gstaad with Eva.

      He could barely remember crossing the border. He couldn’t think of any moment in France apart from the stupid driver. He’d lived inside his head until the cloud had lifted off the Pyrenees that morning and the Swiss wouldn’t stop talking about it.

      He got drunk that night with a Standartenführer of a Panzer division in Bayonne who’d told him his tanks would be in Lisbon before the end of the month.

      ‘We got to the Pyrenees in four weeks. We’ll reach Gibraltar in two, Lisbon in one. We’re just waiting for the crack of the Führer’s starting pistol.’

      They drank claret, a Grand Cru Classé from Château Batailley, bottle after bottle of it as if it was beer. He slept in his clothes that night and woke up in the morning with his face hurting and his throat sore from snoring like a hog. They crossed the border into Spain and picked up an army escort sent with a personal instruction for their safety from General Francisco Franco himself. By nightfall they were still grinding up the hairpins of the Vascongadas as if they were dragging Felsen’s hangover behind them.

      Now that there was no threat of Allied air attack they drove through the night and they were glad to be able to keep the engines running because once they came out of the mountains and on to the meseta there was nothing to stop the wind which drove a bleak mixture of freezing rain and ice into the sides of the trucks. The drivers stamped their feet on the metal floors to keep them from going numb. Felsen, hunched behind the collar of his wool coat, stared into the darkness, the swerving road, the headlights arcing across the trees. He didn’t move. This had become his kind of temperature.

      They refuelled in Burgos, a bleak and frozen place with disgusting food laced, no, swimming in the acrid urine of the poorest quality olive oil which burnt through the bowels of the drivers so that they shat all the way to Salamanca. They shat so frequently that Felsen refused them permission to stop and they just hung their bare arses out of the doors and let the icy wind take it wherever.

      Refugees appeared on the road, most of them on foot, some with a cart between them and occasionally an emaciated mule. They were dark people with faces hollowed out by fear and hunger. They walked automatically, the adults grim, the children blank. These people silenced the drivers, who stopped complaining about the food and the cold. As the trucks ground past them not a head turned, not a single homburg altered its course. The Jews of Europe tramped through the empty wilderness of Spain with their cardboard suitcases and knotted sheets, seeing no further than the next wind-blasted oak on the skyline.

      Felsen looked down on them from the cab. He’d expected to find some pity for them as he had for the two men from Sachsenhausen who’d swept his factory floor after their release at the time of the Berlin Olympics. He found nothing. He found he didn’t have room for anything else.

      They drove through Salamanca. The golden stone of the cathedral walls and the university buildings was dull under the white dome of the frozen sky. There was no fuel. The drivers managed to buy some chorizo and weevil-riddled bread. The convoy moved on to Ciudad Rodrigo and the border town of Fuentes de Oñoro. The Spanish army escort harassed the columns of refugees who shifted off the road on to the barren rock-strewn plain without even a raised gesture.

      The twenty whitewashed hovels on the rocky treeless site that made up Fuentes de Oñoro were frozen in a piercing wind that kept the inhabitants indoors and the refugees huddled behind boulders and upturned carts. The drivers blundered amongst them looking for food and found everyone in a worse state than themselves. A woman in the only shop offered them lumps of pork fat in what looked like the same rancid oil they’d had in Burgos. They named the dish Gordura alla Moda della Guerra and didn’t touch it.

      The customs formalities on the Spanish side were brief. The officials left their less lucrative work of minutely inspecting the jittery refugees’ papers and their reductions of a lifetime’s possessions and came to get their bonuses. Felsen, who knew that this was the border post that would see most of his business, had prepared himself for the crossing with French brandy and jambon de Bayonne. His drivers were furious. The deal was sealed with shots of cheap aguardente and the convoy moved across to the Portuguese side at Vilar Formoso.

      The Portuguese army escort had not arrived. There was a member of the German legation who’d already dispatched a messenger to Guarda. They arranged for the drivers to park the trucks in the square outside the ornately tiled railway station, which showed framed scenes of all the major towns in Portugal. The square was packed with more wild-eyed people. The drivers went looking for food again. They found a soup kitchen which had been set up by firms from Porto but it was for British passport-holders only. They tried talking to the refugees. The women, collapsed under coloured shawls, wouldn’t look at them, and with the men, in long mud-rimmed coats with furry hats jammed down over thick black matted hair and faces blanked out and ragged with beards, they could find no common language. There were Poles and Czechs, Yugoslavs and Hungarians, Turks and Iraqis. They tried the less picturesque – men in creased three-piece business suits who stood above exhausted women and howling children but they were Dutch or Flemish, Rumanians or Bulgarians and in no mood for sign language, especially of the sort which involved pointing a finger into the mouth. Even the young were uncommunicative – the boys shifty, the girls cringing and babies either wailing or mute and vacant. When the engine of one of the approaching Portuguese army motor-cycles back-fired, this massed driftwood of war ducked and flinched as one.

      Felsen worked on the customs officials using charm and some supplies that the member of the German legation had brought with him. The Portuguese responded with cheese, chorizo and wine and were very helpful with the reams of bureaucracy that needed to be filled out to allow the trucks to move freely in the country. When the convoy moved off the chefe of the alfândega, the customs, came out to wave and wish him a speedy return because he could see that this was the auspicious start of what could be years of graft.

      They crossed the River Côa and spent a night at an army post in Guarda where they ate an enormous meal whose four courses all tasted the same and drank a lot of wine from five-litre flagons. Felsen had already begun to feel himself coming round. He