April in Paris (16 page)

The Offenbach performance came to an end in mid-measure.

Voices that had just been railing against the music overlapped the silence. A brusque confusion of human sounds. The percussionist darted to the stage exit like a nimble animal. The bandleader calmly gathered up his scores and pushed the bench away from the piano.

I squeezed past the men sitting at the other tables.

“May I speak to you for a moment?” My hand rested on Leibold’s shoulder. He looked up wonderingly. The others were howling with laughter; only the friendly Emil noticed me.

“Asseyez-vous,”
he said with a smile.

“Captain, I …” A glance at the piano. The gray-haired maes-tro was hurrying away from it, not looking back. There was no more time. I pulled Leibold up. Suspicion in his eyes.

“What’s going on?” he asked, slowly following me.

To get to the middle aisle, I had to step over the colonel’s legs.

He leaned to one side, unwilling to let his laughing audience out of his sight. “And when he stood in front of her with the bouquet in his hand, she said …”

The lighted red arrow pointing to the toilets struck me as the obvious choice. It was only a few steps away. The bandleader was just disappearing behind the velvet curtain. A loud hubbub of conversation filled the room. Someone called out, “What happened to the music?” The vigilant captain was right behind me.

No one stood in our way.

Something ripped. I didn’t hear the explosion. Pain in my ears.

A P R I L I N PA R I S . 149

Before I went to the floor, I saw the red arrow in front of me burst like a sparkler. Something struck my eye. Brightness. The light came in the shape of a cloud; objects were inside it. A perfectly round tabletop, fragments of the chandelier, iron supports, parts of chairs. What I felt as silence was its opposite. Everything burst; the room shook. Suddenly, we were inside a tremendously radiant vacuum.

Leibold was thrown on top of me, astonishment in his eyes.

There was no resistance in his soft body; he lay over me like a blanket. The flames blazed up, and now it gradually became possible to grasp what had happened. Wetness on my temple. I coughed, twisted myself, grabbed the captain by the armpits, and rolled him off of me. From the front, he looked unharmed. But when I set him on the floor, I felt his torn uniform. Blood on his back. His bright, unbelieving face.

I cautiously got to my feet. My left eye was blurred, my cheek-bone bloody. I had no handkerchief, so I wiped my face on my sleeve. The silence, immediately afterward. Only a little smoke.

There was a big hole in the floor in the middle of the room; the bomb must have been hidden there. Despite the charring, I could make out the black of the SS uniforms, the red armbands. The adjutants from Chartres had been literally blown to pieces; one was missing half his head. Emil lay to one side, his legs jerking. I stumbled over to him. Plaster from the ceiling fell to the floor beside me. The flames began shooting up all around. I bent over Emil and his open mouth, which couldn’t scream. His abdomen was ripped open from top to bottom. I had a distant memory of army training, of our sergeant’s voice: “First aid for belly 150 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

wounds!” I pushed Emil’s guts back into his abdominal cavity, yanked his belt over it, and pulled it three holes tighter. The dying man groaned. I straightened up and stood over him. The colonel’s body lay nearby. He was bent backward, his arms over his head, as if reaching for something.

Blood ran down into my eyes. Through the veil, I could see half-naked women rushing down from the stage, followed by the tenor with two buckets of water. Some civilians were crawling on the floor; a girl in a kimono leaned over one of them, a man in a charred suit.

Leibold was conscious, his hands feeling around behind him.

I saw that his whole back was burned, the fabric of his uniform seared into his skin. At this point, he appeared to feel hardly any pain. I leaned him sideways against the wall and then ran into the salon, where the general flight was under way. Soldiers and girls in a wild tumult. I looked for Hirschbiegel in vain, nor was Madame anywhere to be seen.

“Where’s the telephone?” I shouted into the uproar. No one stopped moving. Women ran up and down the stairs. I caught hold of one. “The telephone!”

She pointed to an edged curtain. I pushed it to one side, found a corridor leading to an office, and kicked open the lightweight door. The safe was open; papers were strewn on the floor. Fans, a lace coat, a stuffed poodle, all left behind. I smelled Madame’s perfume, snatched the telephone to my ear.

I went back to Leibold to wait for the arrival of the rescue squad. He’d managed to stagger to his feet but had collapsed after a few meters. The devastated room lay in semidarkness, illu-A P R I L I N PA R I S . 151

minated only by a few flames creeping up the wooden paneling.

The bar was smoldering. The buckets had rolled down into the bomb crater. There was no trace of the musicians or any of the backstage people.

“Why …” The captain spoke in a whisper. I bent down to him. “Why did you call me away?” His eyes were dark. Rust-colored spots on his skull.

The moment was burned deep into the backs of my eyes: Chantal in man’s clothing. In a second, I understood everything.

Old Joffo and the hidden cellar; Chantal, who performed here as Pallas Athena, goddess of war. Her words took on a new, deeper meaning.
Don’t ever go back to Turachevsky’s. Promise me.
I grasped it all so painfully, I had to turn away from Leibold.

“Why?” he asked for the third time. Although he was now in great pain, he didn’t take his eyes off me. “How did you know?”

I lied. “Something didn’t seem right,” I said.

Outside, car doors were slammed. Orders echoed from the salon. Immediately afterward, uniforms: medics. A graying army doctor, a captain wearing old-fashioned eyeglasses, stepped among the bodies, occasionally lifting an arm or turning a face. When he got to Emil, he squatted down, examined him, looked surprised, and waved to a couple of stretcher-bearers. Leibold couldn’t be laid on his back; supported by two medics, he shuffled slowly toward the door. I followed the three of them. Before stepping out, I turned around for one last look. The piano was open, its lid blown off, its strings hanging out. The strings trembled at the steps of the men who were hurrying to and fro.

The doctor said I was lucky. Had the splinter gone in one millimeter farther to the right, he said, they couldn’t have saved my eye. He bandaged it up; for a while, the world was going to look flat to me. Dawn was lightening the sky when they dropped me off at my hotel.

I fell into a dreamless sleep. Shortly before seven o’clock, footsteps came down the hall. A single knock, and they were in the room. Men in civilian clothes. I was to get dressed. Before I could reach full consciousness, they began going through my things. I asked to know why. Orders, they said. I was to keep quiet. While I pulled on my uniform, fear grew inside me. I’d foreseen this moment a hundred times—since the day when I first changed myself into Monsieur Antoine.

They took my French books and personal photographs from A P R I L I N PA R I S . 153

the shelf, along with a journal. Luckily for me, the last entry dated back many months. When they took the suit with the little checks out of the wardrobe, and then the shoes and the hat, I clenched my teeth. The suit proved nothing, but I felt my cover was blown. One of them spotted the place where I had ripped out the label. They said nothing, asked me no questions; they simply took note. I was to hurry up. Every movement I made seemed strange with one eye bandaged. While I grabbed whatever was indispensable, an astonishing wish crossed my mind: If I were only at the front, I’d be spared the worst.

Footsteps above my head. They were in Hirschbiegel’s room, too. I cursed myself for having been so thoughtless as to draw the lieutenant into my double life. I heard him upstairs, ranting in Bavarian dialect. As they escorted me out of my room, the con-frontation on the next floor became physical. Looking up the stairwell, I could see Hirschbiegel, half-dressed and invoking the protection of his colonel. Two men in civilian clothes pinned his arms behind his back, but the stout lieutenant was too strong for them and broke their grip. “Buddy!” Hirschbiegel shouted in great distress. Like an ox that recognizes the butcher. Before I could answer, I was prodded forward.

They put me in an unmarked car and drove me to my workplace in rue des Saussaies. This time, there was no going in through the main entrance, the one I had used every day; instead, they pulled up in front of a solid gate. This was where the transports usually stopped, bringing detainees to be interrogated or picking them up afterward. I was led through corridors whose existence I was aware of but in which I had never set foot. Dim 154 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

lightbulbs hung down over thresholds; carelessly whitewashed walls went past in a blur. I tried to spot name cards on the cell doors, but there weren’t any. Only black holes, on the other side of which men were languishing.

The cell door slammed shut behind me. There was no further word of explanation. I leaned on the wall. I had a sickly feeling I remembered from my school days, when I was about to take a test I wouldn’t pass. On the plank bed, there were two folded blankets; the straw mattress looked freshly filled. The washbasin was dirty, but the water faucet worked. The slop bucket had been dis-infected. The bottom of the window was level with my head. If I wanted to see the street, I’d have to grab the bars and pull myself up.

I took off my jacket and laid it on the mattress to use as a pillow. I was cold. What heat there was came from a grooved pipe that emerged from the ceiling and disappeared through the floor.

I covered myself with the blankets. If I closed my good eye and looked at the lightbulb through my bandage, it was like staring at a hazy sun. My wound burned.

Three SS officers were dead, and there were many wounded.

The people responsible had to be found; news of the incident was bound to penetrate to Berlin. I tried to regard my situation with the eyes of those who would look at me through the peephole, take me from my cell, interrogate me. What had I done? I’d worn a suit with little checks. Nobody would understand my motives.

High treason: the thought entered my brain uninvited and would not be driven away.

Don’t ever go back to Turachevsky’s.
While I lay on my hard bed A P R I L I N PA R I S . 155

and felt my wound with my fingers, I was almost pleased by the thought that I’d wound up in this fix because of Chantal. I admired her. Pallas Athena had taken off her clothes for the hated Germans in order to blow them up afterward. I sat up. Hadn’t I foreseen this outcome? Wasn’t it a given, ever since I took the checkered suit out of the wardrobe, that my adventure had to end here? There would have been only
one
way out: the front. Short work, whether here or there.

I stood up, did some deep knee bends to start my blood moving, and began to walk. Six and a half paces in one direction, six and a half back. The metal bedstead, the bucket, and the washbasin floated past me. It was now full daylight, so they’d turned off the ceiling lights. Would they come for me today? They needed results.

Ijumped to the window bars and pulled myself up. The day was clear and cold. The snow had been pushed aside so that it formed a trench. In the gallery across the way, an SS soldier walked slowly back and forth. He spit a long arc of saliva into the snow and bent over the ramp to see where it would land. The walls enclosing the courtyard resembled barrack walls. The cells were too dark to see if anyone was looking out through the bars like me. I let myself sink back to the floor and resumed my walk.

It was two years since I’d arrived in Paris. Eight wearisome hours in a flatbed truck before we reached the city. At the final rest stop, my major had fairly beamed with joyful impatience and slapped the seams of his trousers with his gloved hands. “Every word, Roth!” he cried. “I want to understand every word!” I had hoped he might invite me to ride with him in his Kübelwagen, A P R I L I N PA R I S . 157

but the major merely bounced on his heels, turned around, and climbed back in.

Shortly after that, we reached the outskirts of the city. A bomber had made a direct hit on a railway line—the crater was geometrically perfect. Sappers stood on the tracks, smoking; one of them waved his pipe at us. The men in the rear of the flatbed truck called out what they saw to those of us who were under the tarpaulin. A private from Franconia was sitting across from me.

His craning neck formed a pale rectangle. “Stop with the buildings!” he shouted. “How about the women?”

“No one’s on the streets,” one of the lookouts said. “Except for our troops.”

The Franconian punched the canvas above his head. “God-damned tarp! When we marched into Paris, they had lots of open vehicles.”

Later, someone shouted, “There it is!” The truck slowed down and entered a long curve. Elegant windows; trees in full bloom.

We’d reached the Arc de Triomphe. What I actually
saw
could have been any building in any city. Then the wheezing quartermaster appeared behind our truck. “Roth!” he called into the darkness, narrowing his eyes. “Is Corporal Roth in there?”

I pushed the Franconian’s knees aside, squeezed my way through, and jumped off the truck, which continued to move.

The light was a dazzling white, blinding. The quartermaster steadied me to keep me from tumbling over. His glasses glinted.

“I’m taking you with me to P Four, P Six, and HJ Seven,” he said, paging through his list. The breeze ruffled his carbon paper.

“You’ll be staying in the same hotel as the major.”

158 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

I stood on the Champs-Elysées. The trees lining it were so far from the middle of the street that I couldn’t tell whether they were plane trees or lindens. I actually couldn’t spot a single civilian. The sun turned the street into a bright wedge. The quartermaster hastened back to his Kübelwagen, calling back over his shoulder, “Hurry it up!” I clasped my hands behind my back, raised my head, and stepped out like a field marshal. Only for a few meters. Then the truck’s horn sounded behind me.