Peter Rabe - A Shroud for Jesso

“Of course I’ll help you. Johannes will give you that passport.” She turned, leaned against the satin couch by the window. “How long will you be gone?”

“Perhaps-” Then he got up too. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

She just looked back at him. Jesso came closer.

“You’re going along, don’t you hear?”

“You don’t really have to go there, do you?”

He got very patient then. “Look, Renette. You’re arguing about something you don’t know a thing about. Pack something, get me that passport. I’ll get the tickets, and in a few days we’ll come back to-to whatever you had in mind. But don’t argue with me about this thing. It’s too big. You hear me?”

“Of course, I see what you mean.” She took her hands out of the pockets and started to hold her arms. There was a rare indecision in her posture. “Perhaps I mean this, Jesso. Over here, Jesso, I know you, I want you, we are what I know now. You and I. But over there you must be somebody else. I’ve never known you over there and your life is perhaps quite different. Perhaps not, Jesso, but I don’t know. I want you now, here, and not later and somewhere else. You must not start to think of me as something you own, keep around wherever you happen to be. It would not be the same. What we have between us is just the opposite of that. It is the very thing you have given me, Jesso, and it is freedom.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “I want you here. So I’ll wait for you here, Jesso.”

“Renette-”

“You said a few days only.”

She wasn’t going to budge and he knew it. So just a few days. She’d wait and he had to wait. But it didn’t feel right to him.

“You can’t stay here. Dear Johannes, you know, isn’t going to-”

She just laughed and started to turn. “I’m safe here, Jesso.” She walked to the dressing room.

He followed her and watched while she changed to a dress. He lit a cigarette and watched, leaning against the doorframe.

“Just one thing, Renette.” She looked up. “Stay close to the house, stay away from Helmut, and watch Kator like a hawk. When I get back here I don’t want any damage.”

“Yes, Jesso.”

“Now come along.”

He took her downstairs and Kator was in the library. One of the files was open and Kator was leafing through a folder. He stopped when he saw them and shut the drawer. It clanked like a metal door.

“You are overstaying your welcome, Jesso.”

“I’m leaving.”

“Good-by, then.” Kator carried his folder to the desk.

“I got something for you,” Jesso said, and he tossed Snell’s doctored passport on top of Kator’s folder. “And from you I want a going-away present.”

“Johannes, I want you to give Jesso a passport. A good one.”

Kator was leaning back with his hands across his front and there was no way of telling what he thought. For that matter, Jesso couldn’t even figure why Kator hadn’t made his move yet. Or perhaps he had, only the trap hadn’t sprung yet. Or maybe Kator was really through. The deal was closed and paid for and that was it. Kator might be that sort.

“When do you want it?” Kator asked.

If this was bluff, Jesso would play it the same way. “Tomorrow. At eight.”

“Very well,” Kator said. “I still have your pictures.”

Jesso felt flat. Kator had been easy before, but not that easy.

“Provided one thing,” Kator said.

Here it came.

“My sister remains behind.”

If that was his angle, he was welcome to it. Jesso looked at Renette and she looked back. She played it well and made the right kind of face. It had been easy.

“Have the passport ready,” Jesso said. “She’ll stay.” Then he took Renette’s arm and they left the room.

When they got out to the hall they didn’t know where to go. They didn’t know why they felt that way, because everything had gone all right and in only a few days Jesso would be back. They walked into the garden and for a while they leaned over the stone ballustrade of the terrace and looked at the winding walks.

“He didn’t even make a stir,” Jesso said.

“I told you he wouldn’t,” Renette said.

“But he meant to. What if we were going together? That’s how he meant it.”

“I know,” she said. She took some gravel and tossed little stones at a flower bed. “But it doesn’t matter.”

Jesso said nothing and Renette tossed some more stones.

“Renette. It does matter.”

“What he did?”

“No, you. That you won’t come.”

“That doesn’t matter either. Because you agreed.”

“You make it sound easy,” he said, and hearing his own voice, he wondered at the change in it.

“Jesso,” she said. “You sound like good-by.”

“Like hell.”

But when they stood there longer, not speaking, the damp air, maybe, or the lead in the low sky got to him, and Renette too didn’t feel the ease any more and the sure sense of herself, and when he said, “Come,” she followed him, very eager, and they went upstairs without saying anything and closed the door behind them.

Then they made love as if it were the only time, with no before and no after.

He watched the runway fall away and then the city where it lay flat below with a green park spreading at one end and factory chimneys at the other. It disappeared after a while as they entered the overcast. Jesso pulled out his passport again. The green cover was properly worn and inside there were his name and his picture and his signature, and there was nothing wrong with any of it as far as he could tell. He stuck it back in his pocket with the envelope and the airplane tickets. One of them said Hannover to Frankfurt-am-Main and the other one hadn’t been used yet. It said Frankfurt-am-Main to New York. There was a return ticket too. A week at the most and he’d be back. Everything was running so smoothly that he would be back even sooner.

Jesso sat in his seat and didn’t feel right, even though the feeling made no sense. Renette? How could he feel uneasy about something he wanted so much and had altogether? Helmut? Why waste time thinking about a thing like him? Perhaps Kator. He thought of Kator when the plane went down at Frankfurt, when he got off and went along the airport corridor to the other ramp. His connecting flight was there. Jesso stood in the line that went through customs, and if there was any reason to think of Kator, this was it. Maybe the passport wasn’t as good as it looked. Almost Jesso’s turn in line. Maybe they’d take one look, pull him out, and that was Kator’s play. Jesso could see the two guys in green, customs officers. Two German policemen with those crazy shakos on their heads, like flowerpots. And two M.P.'s. They wore khaki and white for the occasion.

The line moved and Jesso stepped closer. He had a very calm thought and it was that he’d kill somebody if they tried to pull him out. “Pass, bitte,” and Jesso handed it over. Then he got it back and walked through the gate. Then the plane, the stewardess who was a living doll from Cleveland, Ohio, and the seat. The seat. The plane took off and that was that.

He didn’t take a deep breath of relief, because he hadn’t been holding his breath. It was a weird state to know that nothing was right and to find nothing wrong that he could do anything about; and weirder still to know that even inside of him nothing was happening. They shipped eels that way, curled inside a block of ice in suspended animation. The whole trip went by without any real passage of time. He didn’t come out of it until the pilot invited everyone over the loud-speaker to look down below, the United States coast was coming up. Jesso thought it was the weirdest yet to be going in one direction in order to go in the other.