The Prize Rules Ch. 04

She began to cry again, but she nodded.

She invited him inside the flat and he watched as the sitter was paid and left before he asked what he felt that he just had to ask. "Please, I think that Friedl had some service insurance. Do you know if he put you down as the beneficiary? I have a fear that if he did not tell of your getting married ..."

Ilka looked up then as the thought hit her, "Then we may not get anything, Katryn and I."

"Do not fret over it yet," he said, "Please allow me to find out what I can. I will try to help in any way that I am able."

He left late that night and returned the next day, since he was not on any duty rosters. It was how he came to have his heart stolen by their tiny daughter who was a little colicky at the time.

"Give her to me," he smiled, "I think that you need a little rest and I do have a little experience. My sister went through this with her baby, and my hearing was never the same afterwards."

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"What are you doing, Hans-Joachim?" Ilka finally asked him a week later, "You have gone out almost half a dozen times to buy food and things for Katryn and I."

He looked at her for a moment, "Friedl asked me once - he even made me agree because he was so serious about it, that if something happened to him ... I mean ... "

Ilka nodded, "I understand, Hans-Joachim. I only wish that I could tell you not to worry for us, but I do not know anything myself of what I ought to do. My career will fall apart very soon. I do not know what I will do then. I used to travel sometimes to other countries to enter contests and pageants. The German government does not permit such things here. Married and with a child ..."

"I have an idea," he said as he indicated a place on the couch, "Give me a moment to put this little girl to bed again, and I hope that she can sleep this time. I do not know what I can do, but I have an idea."

She watched, clearly surprised as he took her baby to her crib and returned with a pleased smile only a minute later.

"How did you do that?" she asked, clearly a little surprised, "I thought that she would howl again. That is what she has been doing for me quite often when she gets like this."

"I think it is because she knows that you are her mother," he winked, "Me, I am quite obviously an amateur to her and so I think that she is just glad to be away from the danger."

He did his best, speaking to her as he thought it all through. "The Nazis do not allow beauty competitions such as pageants. I read of it once on a patrol - since there was nothing else to read but that one page of the fashion section from a two-week old newspaper shared and fought over by twenty-two men."

"They fought over the fashion pages?" she asked, and he shook his head.

"No. They fought over the important things to them like the soccer scores. Oh, there was almost blood over it and the pages were in tatters. I read the fashion page since it was all that there was left to read in one piece.

But I do know that the party sees things a little differently. They seem to be looking for what they think of as ideals of German femininity and those must include some basic concepts, such as marriage and motherhood. That is why they DO sponsor and provide assistance with festival contests, which hold up a much more wholesome - to their eyes - model for women. They praise "Harvest Queens" and "Bloom Queens" - even "Wine Queens".

Do you have an agent? You might suggest a different approach to them, something where they would not be seen in the bad light that they are cast in now."

She nodded and thought about it, seeing some possibilities, "Yes. Before I had my agent, I was in those festivals and there are a lot of them."

She looked down, still thinking it through, but then she looked over and shook her head, "I cannot do it, Hans-Joachim. I am a widow now and ..."

They were silent then, both of them thinking furiously.

"Ilka," he said carefully, "listen. I made Friedl a promise to help you and take care of you as I can, and I do not mind at all. But I am the same as he was, and that means that I might not have a much longer life either. I want to find something which would work for you even so."

They agreed to keep thinking on it.

As soon as he could and before an upcoming patrol, Hans-Joachim was back with at least a little good news. "You are the beneficiary of a small but steady trust which Friedl set up in the event of his death. It will pay you at least enough to keep the rain off your heads."

Ilka was a little relieved, but she knew that it wouldn't be enough at some point. She'd do it if she had to, but at this point, her Katryn was too young for her to find a job someplace. Still, it was something.

But more important to her than that, she now felt that she had one friend and she enjoyed his company because aside from the loss which they were both trying to come to grips with, they did find ways to laugh a little and that helped them both. The times when he was to go out on a patrol frightened her.

He handed her a copy of his own insurance policy and her eyes widened, "Hans-Joachim, I - "

He just smiled, "I see it as a way to get the bastards to pay if I drown, that's all."

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It took her almost two months after that to get her courage up, but she found that she cared for him - even in their strange, arm's length way but she had to know about something.

It sat in her like a kind of gloomy, mysterious thing to watch him with Katryn and the way that he took great pains to do what he could for them. She knew that he saw it as his duty and even that he was being truthful when he told her that he didn't mind a bit. It even came to her that somewhere in him, he might need to do it and then she struggled over what the reason or reasons for it might be.

Finally, Ilka sat Hans-Joachim down and she grabbed his jaw gently, "No jokes now, and I expect a truthful answer.

I have asked you twice before about whether you are seeing anybody. The first time, you made noises as though it was all a joke to you, but I am coming to know you as a man who likes a joke - except in serious circumstances.

I know that you consider our circumstances - Katryn's and mine - to be serious. It was why your answer to me the next time that I asked was very uncomfortable to you. I saw that in your face quite plainly.

Now, we have become friends over all of the help that you try to give my daughter and I. So I will ask you once again and I wish to hear the truth.

My husband's best friend has become the same thing to his widow, and my friend is a very attractive man. Why do I never hear you speak of a Freundin for yourself, Hans-Joachim?"

He looked at her a little blankly for a moment and then he sighed heavily as he began to tell her about his time with Eden. After hearing it, she nodded.

"You see?" she asked, "THAT is something which I can understand at least a little. Now that I know you, it makes quite a lot of sense to me."

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It became a strange sort of dance between them. He spent as much of his free time with them as he could. He'd pay for the babysitter and take Ilka to dinner and to see a movie or sometimes a dance revue, and mostly, it was just a friendship between two people who somehow felt that they'd been damaged by life. Ilka knew that the clock was ticking, but she never again wanted to grieve over someone that close to her ever again.

And she understood perfectly the way that Hans-Joachim felt as well, feeling as though he'd met and had the great love of his life over only two weeks, and now that it was past, knew that he only wandered through his life alone.

Over the next couple of months, they occasionally shared her bed, but most of that was for the comfort of having someone who knew of their pain and emptiness.

The first time had been an unspoken thing between them, both of them needing something and neither one wanting to drag up the courage to ask. Hans-Joachim had a couple of days leave and he chose to spend it with Ilka and Katryn as he always did now. He took them to a good restaurant and it had been a lovely evening with first one of them and then the other holding Katryn while they ate. Back in her flat, Katryn was sleeping and Ilka had already said goodnight and gone to the bedroom.

Hans-Joachim was already on the sofa and would have been asleep if it had not been for his silent questioning of himself as he thought about Ilka and wondered why it felt as though he was on the verge of crossing a boundary with the widow of his best friend. As his thoughts ran to their ending, he'd have shaken his head at his thoughts, but he was lying down then.

The bedroom door opened and Ilka came out, walking across the dark flat lit by the dim glow of the streetlights outside coming in through the curtains. She was wearing her housecoat and as she watched her, Ullmann thought that she looked like an apparition to him, the ghost of a wondrous and beautiful woman.

It almost caused him to make a decision to make more of an effort at meeting someone for himself soon, but he dashed the thought because he didn't think that he had it in him to appear to be as carefree as the effort would call for him to be.

He was surprised when Ilka walked up to him and so he sat up. As he looked up at her, he saw that her eyes glittered and he guessed that she might have been crying again or about to.

"What's wrong, Ilka?" he asked.

Ilka said nothing in reply. She only opened her housecoat slowly - still looking to him as though she was about to burst into tears. He could see that she wore nothing underneath.

Ilka reached for his hand and began to pull and he understood that she wanted him to get up. When he did, she shifted her grip but didn't let go of his hand and she began to walk back to her bed with him.

He got it then. As he understood the rules, he wasn't to say a word, just as she said none. They were a pair of lonely people who needed human contact, that was all.

The sex wasn't mechanical as they both put a lot into it, but there were the rules. He did his best to make love to Eden once more, thought he never spoke her name.

Inside however, he was almost crying her name out and he knew then that she'd always be there in him. He was sure that it wouldn't have been anything that she'd have ever wanted - to haunt a man that she'd likely never thought of once she'd gotten over him. Eden wasn't like that. He thought that wherever she was, she was living her life and he hoped that she was happy with whatever man was lucky enough to have her love for him.

But he knew that without ever meaning to allow it, he was more than a little haunted. Ilka was the only woman who he thought that he could have feelings for other than Eden and other than what they were doing for each other, he doubted that he was what she'd ever want.

Ilka had no idea if Hans-Joachim pretended that she was his Eden when they made love together and she wouldn't have blamed him if he did.

She was too busy herself pretending that he was Friedl, though the way that Hans-Joachim went about it, it was a difficult illusion for her to maintain. For all of the way that she loved him, Friedl had been only a barely experienced lover for her. Hans-Joachim was in another category altogether - and several removed from Friedl at the same time.

He was gone on a patrol for over a month. She was almost a wreck.

When she finally came to realise why - besides the obvious - there was no 'almost' about it.

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"I have finally thought of a way to make things work for me," she smiled as she held out a cup of coffee to him the morning after he'd returned as she tiptoed back to bed when Katryn went down for her morning nap. "But I will not tell you until you are at least halfway through that cup."

He looked at her curiously and he asked, but she'd tell him nothing.

"Fine," she said with a little smile, "I will only say one thing beforehand and no hints will be forthcoming at all. Do you wish to hear it?"

He sipped his coffee and then he nodded, "Yes."

"You might not like it," she smiled even more mysteriously.

"Well?" he asked after a moment, "Are you going to tell me what you wanted to say - whenever I have drained this cup enough for you?"

"I have said that part of it," she chuckled, "that you might not like it."

He nodded and drank the whole cup and then grimaced at the heat which had still been in it.

"Tell me then."

"You will have to marry me," she said, still smiling.

He tilted his head as he looked back, "I have to marry you to get the answer?"

She hit him playfully as she laughed quietly, "No, you will have to marry me. Then I can enter almost as many contests, and I am a mother.

Who better to fit their ideals? The arseholes in the party will find joy in their hearts that a pretty mother is married to a U-Boat officer - someone which they see as a national hero and she competes in pageants which they promote.

Katryn will have a father, the one that she gets so excited to see whenever you come to stay for a few days."

She shrugged with a little grin which he thought was wonderful to see, since it seemed to be something that he hadn't really seen much of in her, "And I will have the wonderful man who now let's me become a woman once more, living, breathing, and alive - even though we both still grieve in our way."

She lowered her voice then, "Were you in the Hitler Youth?"

He shook his head, "They set up a chapter where I lived, but the sons of fishermen are not often available for the meetings and the happy singing of party songs. It's a little different from the life of farm kids. Hard to drag a boy off to a meeting when he's often at sea working long into the evening. The fish don't seem to care about the party all that much.

I've heard that they ordered kids to go at one point, but the organisers were asked whether they also wanted to eat fish, since it had to go one way of the other. I don't know if they've solved it all even now - I hope not, anyway. I do know that they had much more success with boys from the families of the fish cannery workers.

When they set up the group for younger boys, I was too old by then - happily. I have trouble sitting still and being lectured for long periods of time.

That's one of the reasons that I went to the U-Boats. Nobody's got time to listen and space is too precious and busy on one to leave room for a political officer to sit around on his ass writing up his notes for his evening sermon."

"I managed to avoid most of it," she said, "the League of German Girls and all of that. A fortunate matter of age and the timing of when it was set up.

Where I lived, we wondered about the truckloads of city girls who came to help on the farms - work to feed the nation in the fresh air and all of that.

Well, the fresh air was where I already was and if you grow up there, you find little romantic notion to the work. It's just what needs to be done - whether the Chancellor decrees it or not. They had a hope that girls would settle there to marry farm boys and have many little future party members. I suppose that they still do.

But a lot of the farm boys wanted to go to live in the city. Work in the factories starts and stops at set times. The work on a farm never does. I entered a few harvest beauty contests and after having my ears filled with how lovely they told me that I was and that I ought to find an agent, I saw a way to put a little distance between myself and the sheaves of grain in the fields - as well as the mountains of shit in the barns."

She looked over, "I imagine that this U-Boat business requires quite a time to learn?"

He nodded, "Whether one knocks on the door or whether one is the son of a heavy cruiser captain, sooner or later, you have to put in your time. Even an officer from the surface fleet soon learns that everything changes as soon as you close the hatch."

Ilka said, "I think that you must have been spared a lot of the political bluster, if you were far away on a passenger ship and even now, you cannot see most of the changes on the street where you are.

I am not sure that I want to live in Germany even if we win this war.

Before I married Friedl, I went back home for a little visit and I saw a friend of mine there. She was in love with a boy that I knew as well, and it had gone on forever, since they were childhood sweethearts. But everyone must prove their background nowadays.

Well she was alright, but it became known that the boy had some family members which the party - and only the party - decided gave him enough of a heritage that they didn't like.

It was stupid. All of us knew his family forever. They were just like any of us, just farmers working to stay alive. When I saw her, they'd shaved her head and made her wear a sign whenever she went into town. It said, 'I fornicate with Jews.'

The boy was rounded up and no one knew where he was taken.

Some of the photographers that I used to work with are missing and it was said in whispers to me that it was over their liking other men. There used to be families of gypsies who came to hire on to work at harvest time. I asked, but no one had seen them in two years. I have heard of camps where they were taken to and kept.

How fucking noble a nation we are to do things like that to people. I have heard of even worse things, but I have no wish to ruin a Sunday morning with thoughts of it."

"I feel the same way over it", he said as he began to get out of the bed and walk to the bathroom. "The way that they manage the country makes it plain that they are a bunch of louts who have somehow risen to power."

Ilka admired him for a moment as he stood naked in the doorway of the bathroom. He shook his head a little, "I need more coffee and I will bring you a cup as well. I can't struggle with the idiotic policies of the state and your mysterious need to get married at the same time. One of us might be mad - I just do not know which one yet."

"You don't like my idea?" she called after him a little quietly, careful not to wake Katryn.

"I love it," he chuckled, "but I see the flaw in the plan. Ilka, you are a beautiful woman. What do you want me for as a husband?"

"To slap around until your eyes can start to focus," she laughed, "Have you looked into a mirror lately ... at any time at all since you became a man?"

She got up and came to him then, leading him to her mirror and standing beside him. "Think of what they would like to see. They know nothing of it yet, but they would like to see a truly national couple. It's all a load of shit, but those are the glasses that they wear. I only know that it will work for us and it certainly can't hurt my prospects in any competition.

We are that couple, Hans-Joachim; the beauty queen from the Rheinland with her husband, the U-Boat warrior from Schleswig-Holstein. What do you think?"

He nodded, "So far, so good. I can almost hear the printing presses as they crank out the recruitment posters with our photographs on them. 'Join the U-Boat Navy! Sign up today and you get one of these,'" he smiled as he held out his hand toward Ilka.

She shook her head, "No, this is for us to give us a way ahead.

I will not work for them directly in any way and I already worry for Katryn. I am just thinking that if women live in constant bombardment of being told of the national ideal for women and the inducements to bear many children, well ... it all makes them very quietly wish to be left alone, those who have much of a brain. But as for advertising for products for them to buy, I might find more modelling work this way."

Ullmann nodded, seeing it as he handed her a cup of coffee and raised his to take a sip, "How did this wisdom come to you?"