After the Downfall

Drepteaza looked severe. “You say it is nothing. Then you will get angry because we can’t guess what it is and deliver it to you without being asked. We know how these things go – we’ve seen them before.”

She wasn’t going to leave him alone. He could see that coming like a rash – or like a salvo of Katyusha rockets from a Stalin Organ. Well, maybe the truth would shut her up. She couldn’t get too mad – he hoped – not when she’d asked for it. “If I wanted any woman in my bed, it would be you.” Any Bucovinan woman. Yes, he had to make the reservation even after Velona tried to kill him. If that didn’t say he had it bad, what would?

He didn’t shock the priestess. To his immense relief, he saw that right away. He saw no answering spark flash, though. Damn!

“It is a compliment. I ought to thank you for it. I do thank you for it,” she said slowly.

“But.” Hasso packed a world – two worlds – of bitterness into one word.

“Yes. But.” Drepteaza did him the courtesy of not misunderstanding, and of not beating around the bush the way he had. “I am very sorry, Hasso Pemsel, but when I look at you I see a Lenello. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t think anything else needs saying – do you?”

The Lenelli looked down their noses at Grenye. That the Grenye might look up their noses at the Lenelli – they weren’t tall enough to look down them – hadn’t crossed Hasso’s mind. The Lenelli, after all, looked like Aryans. Of course they were better than these little swarthy people … weren’t they?

Didn’t he himself want to sleep with Drepteaza more in spite of her looks than because of them? Well, yes and no. Yes, she was small and dark. But she was also very pretty and, as he knew from the baths, made just the way a woman ought to be. Maybe she was built no better than Leneshul. Even so, she was a hundred times as interesting – which had nothing to do with looks.

“You don’t say anything,” Drepteaza remarked.

“What am I supposed to say? I already say too much,” Hasso answered.

She sent him a wry smile. “You’re no Lenello, regardless of how you look. If you were, you would be telling me how wonderful you were and what an honor it would be for me to open my legs for you.”

Hasso’s ears felt on fire. Well-bred women in Germany didn’t talk about opening their legs even after you propositioned them. They might do it, but they didn’t talk about it so baldly. He tried to match her tone: “If you don’t already know I am wonderful, what can I say to make you believe it?”

“Probably nothing.” Few German women had Drepteaza’s devastating honesty, either. She went on, “I look at you, and I see things like Muresh. I see a countryside full of massacres like that, from here all the way west to the seacoast. And I should be honored

to sleep with you?” She shuddered.

She might as well be a Jew looking at an SS man, Hasso thought. He did some shuddering of his own. The SS was bound to be out of business now. The Jews who were left in Europe, and the Jews from America and Russia, were having their turn. Hasso didn’t – couldn’t – know what was going on in the Reich now in the aftermath of a lost war, but he wasn’t sorry not to be there to see it. Hard times: he was sure of that.

And if the Jews were taking revenge, could the Grenye of Bucovin do the same? The Jews hadn’t had to worry about magic. Oh, some of the Nazi bigwigs dabbled in the occult, but it sure didn’t do them a pfennig’s worth of good. It was real here, though – no doubt about it. And I’m helping these dark little mindblind... ?

If I want to keep on living, I am.

Besides … “No matter what I look like, I am not a Lenello,” Hasso said carefully.

“Yes, so you keep insisting, and it seems to be true. But you still look like one, so it helps you less than you think even if it is.” The skin at the corners of Drepteaza’s eyes crinkled; the ends of her mouth turned up the tiniest bit. “And we both know a man will say anything at all to coax a woman into bed with him.”

“What?” Hasso did his best to look comically astonished.

It must have worked – Drepteaza burst out laughing, which didn’t happen every day, or every week, either. She wagged a finger at him. “You are a wicked man. Wicked, I tell you.”

Most of her was kidding; she made that plain enough. But down underneath, at some level, she had to mean it. And so Hasso couldn’t just go on with the joke and say something like, At your service. Instead, he said, “Well, the Lenelli think so, too.”

“Yes.” The priestess sent him a hooded look. “And it could be, couldn’t it, that all of us are right?”