How would you like that,” the commandant asked, his face inclined to Franz’s ear, “for those lips to be the last you know of this world?” His breath was heavy with the anise he took, that he said the ladies liked. He raised an eyebrow, waiting, as the two other soldiers from the morning’s detail watched out of the corners of their eyes. He’d sworn he’d make a man out of Franz.
The courtyard had been a parade ground in better times, and its walls still sheltered against gusty spring winds, making what could have been a chill day temperate. They had brought the Belgian woman in to stand before the chipped wall, the spy, the dangerous beauty, and Franz thought she only looked frail, an embarrassment to the two hulking guards who held her arms.
Franz daydreamed in the soft sun and thought of Klara instead, and how fine it was to be married: they’d both confessed it a relief, to be settled at twenty and done with the courting and preening and making themselves attractive to others. He was lucky, for her, and for this home-front post, while so many of their former schoolmates were being conscripted for the Kaiser. He barely knew how to hold this new rifle.
His commandant went on, impatiently, “She poisoned them, you know. A deadly toxin, in the lipstick. Your last schmatzer, yes?” Immediately Franz wondered how this could be true, how any assassin could deliver a poisoned kiss without succumbing herself. And everyone knew the Field Marshal, seventy-two and morbidly obese, had collapsed in his potatoes at a state dinner, more the victim of a coronary than any seductress. Clearly, the administration had concocted a bald premise. Which by no means made the Belgian woman innocent: Franz had heard, in the newly gained territories, that no one could be trusted, not the civilians, even the women, that youths and servicemen who let their guard down were being murdered in bordellos and bars. Such ravenous hatred.
As if cued by Franz’s thoughts, she straightened then and fixed the firing squad with a flirting look, an exaggerated moue from those allegedly infamous lips. The commandant asked which idiot had forgotten her blindfold, and a guard mumbled that she hadn’t wanted one. Franz realized he would never be able to tell Klara about the spy, her painted lips, her contempt as she kissed the air at him, her obscene mugging. She was putting on a show, even now, a calculated act, and he wondered how many times her lips, if not poisoned then still venomous, had lied with a sigh, a little breath, You kiss marvelously. Franz remembered girls laughing and calling him clumsy, saying he kissed like an ox, no, like some great monkey, no, haha, just like a trained circus bear! At least he’d never been lied to, though, betrayed in that particular intimate way.
On his last leave home, Klara had apologized for the kriegsbrot, but had got hold of a little bratwurst, and dinner was good. When Franz pressed his lips to hers afterward, Klara received him and did not turn away. Klara had never told him he kissed well or badly. But now he wondered, how much pressure, should he move his lips more? Did his beard scratch her? She would never say it, even if he disgusted her, even if he’d neglected to wipe the sausage grease from his mouth. Suddenly anguished, he wondered how he could trust her with anything, if not that.
And Franz saw fully just what the spy had taken from him, was taking, even as she posed, mocking his misery. He had never been a vengeful person, when the injury was his own. But Klara did not deserve it, this shadow of his mistrust, that he did not see how he’d ever displace. His commandant barked, Ready, and then, Aim, then spoke so close his waxed mustache brushed Franz’s ear, his breath cloyed with anise: “Fire, you fat bastard.” And though they were supposed to sight for the heart, he let his aim drift higher, to those defiant pursed lips, as if to intercept that spiteful kiss still lingering unmet in the swirling indecisive spring air, before it could land.