April in Paris (2 page)

Je l’ai achetée d’une famille qui a vécu longtemps en Allemagne.”

“Quel est votre prix?”

The dealer named a price for the clock, a sum no Frenchman would consider paying. I offered half as much. He wouldn’t yield so much as a centime, claiming he’d promised not to sell the clock for less than it was worth.

I said, “Well then, I’m sorry,” and penetrated farther into rue de Gaspard.

A young woman was sitting motionless on a stone that lay like 8 . M I C H A E L W A L L N E R

a rock fallen from the sky in front of a bookshop. I could make out her slender legs under her coat. She was reading. When I was nearly past her, she looked up. I went no farther and stepped into the shop instead. The man behind the counter had gray hair, combed with a part. He was holding the stump of an unlighted cigar in his mouth and spreading paste on paper labels with a stringy brush. He took a quick glance at my uniform.

“Vous cherchez quelque chose de spécial?”
he muttered without interest. Indifferent to my reply, he stuck a little label onto a book’s spine. I indicated that I’d take a look around. The gesture he made in response was more dismissive than inviting. I stepped over to the shelves next to the window. My finger glided over the backs of the books as I looked out through the dull glass.

She was still sitting on the stone. A uniquely beautiful face.

Outsized eyes, a seductively round forehead under reddish brown curls. Her face had a cunning, feline look and softly curving lips; her chin was too short and ran sharply back to her throat.

A butterfly lighted on the windowsill. The girl jerked her head up as though someone had bumped into her. Slowly, she laid the book aside, stood up, and walked over to the window, where the butterfly remained with trembling wings. As she approached, I withdrew between the bookshelves, step by step. She reached the low window on tiptoe, her eyes fixed on the butterfly. When she was only a few meters away, she stared in my direction—and didn’t notice me.

With several books in my hands, I was suddenly conscious of the shop owner’s scrutiny. He closed up the pot of glue and stepped forward.
“Vous avez trouvé?”
he asked.

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

I turned around, and so I didn’t see if the butterfly flew away.

The man was a head shorter than me; his balding scalp gleamed through his parted hair.

I took a step toward the exit.
“Il y en a trop. Je ne sais pas comment choisir.”

With that, I laid the books down, reached the open door, and crossed threshold and step in one stride. My boot struck the pavement hard.

She was gone. My eyes searched behind some bushes and then shifted to the gate at the end of the little street. Her book lay on the stone. I gazed at the slim volume without touching it.
Le
Zéro
; the title meant nothing to me. Suddenly, as I looked up at all the shuttered windows, I felt that someone was watching me from behind them. Slowly, but covering a lot of ground with each step, I made for the black entrance gate and passed through to the street outside, avoiding two sullen-looking French cops on patrol.

I turned into the tree-lined avenue.

Where have you been?” the SS corporal asked. I hadn’t slept well, I was nervous, and I’d been waiting for two hours.

I’d tried to find a comfortable position on the bench in the hall.

An unbroken stream of officers came and went, and I kept having to snap to attention. My military pay book and papers had been checked on the ground floor. Only after a telephone call had the guards let me through. On the way up, I’d admired the green-veined marble stairs. Diplomats and their ladies had strolled up and down these steps in days gone by. You could almost forget where you were.

“Where were you?” the SS corporal repeated.

“Out here. Where else?” I replied without standing up. We were equal in rank, this fellow and I. The first day in a new post-ing determines how you’re going to be treated there.

A P R I L I N P A R I S . 11

“You’d better lose that tone of voice.” He directed me to follow him. “Do you know shorthand?” he asked over his shoulder.

A simple yes would have sufficed. I said, “If I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

“Is that so?” The SS corporal turned around and grinned un-pleasantly. “We’ve got a lot of people in this place who don’t know a thing about stenography.”

I clamped my jaws together and walked on in silence. I was twenty-two, and I hadn’t yet been to the front. But I’d become a soldier at an age when it couldn’t be avoided forever. I was one of two brothers. My father didn’t have the money to send us both to university, but Otto had been allowed to study medicine. I’d begun a law course, just to show that I could get by without the family’s help; however, the war had relieved me of making any further decisions.

We entered the offices of the unit I’d been assigned to. Tall oaken doors, a powerful-looking woman in civilian clothes, two soldiers sitting at typewriters. I had to wait some more. Finally, the SS corporal knocked on the first office door. I went in and stood across from the thin man I’d met three days before, when I was walking down rue des Saussaies.

“Ah, it’s you,” he said, looking up from his papers. “Have you been told what you have to do?”

“Not in detail.” I was standing stiffly erect, even though the regulations didn’t require me to.

“Details are important.” He took up the greenish gray file and got to his feet. Average height, and slighter than I remembered, despite the tight-fitting uniform. Head almost bald, mouth strikingly sorrowful.

12 . M I C H A E L W A L L N E R

“This way,” he said. He opened the barrier beside his desk and the double door behind it. Before stepping through the door, he asked, “Roth, am I right?”

“Corporal Roth, yes, sir,” I replied.

“How long in the army?”

“Since March 1940, Captain.”

“You picked the best time.”

I didn’t know whether the reference was to our victorious cam -

paign or my new duty assignment. We came into a brightly lighted room.

The first thing I saw was the boy’s face, his wet hair hanging down over his forehead. In the corner stood a tub of water, the water still moving. He was a kid, fifteen at most, with his hands tied behind his back. I could smell his fear. I noticed two uniforms, both SS corporals, and I produced my writing pad. The captain took a seat and made a brusque gesture toward a smaller table. My pencil fell to the floor. I picked it up as unobtrusively as I could, took the few steps to the table, and cast my eyes down.

Everything started immediately, without any transition.

Ihurried back to the hotel and fell onto the bed that nearly filled up my room. From the floor above my head came the sounds of rushing water and boots flung into a corner: Hirschbiegel, the bather, had come home. This could go on for hours. I laid the loaf of bread on the table, but I couldn’t eat anything. I stared at the faded shepherdesses on the wall and tried not to pay attention to the noise. The beds were placed head-to-head on either side of the wall, which was as thin as cardboard. Someone on the telephone next door said, “So what’s up? … I have no idea.

The best place is where we were the day before yesterday. Jardin something or other. Oh, and I’m bringing someone with me …

You know very well.”

Another noise source: the elevator. Luftwaffe meeting on the fifth floor; the soldier manning the lift was ferrying air force offi-14 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

cers up and down. I stood uncertainly between the bed and the table, aware of my heartbeat, as I had frequently been in recent weeks. I turned to the mirror. The narrow nose, the dark eyebrows. They made me think about earlier photographs. It wasn’t my mouth that had become harder; it was my eyes. You need a haircut, I thought, wetting my fingers and smoothing the hair on the side of my head. I slowly sank back onto the bed. I was thirsty, but there was nothing left to drink in the room. My eyes fell on my boots. I didn’t want to go out dressed like
that
, not this evening.

I sat there for several long minutes, my head on my chest and my shoulders sagging. The people I’d seen on the Pont Royal had been lounging on the sun-warmed stones, their eyes shut and turned toward the light. Should someone wearing military boots pass by, they’d open their eyes. I feared those moments, when they turned away or withdrew into their homes, when they murmured curses I heard and understood. If I didn’t have to look different from them, I was someone who could blend in anywhere, in any city. I wanted to disappear among them, to be part of them; no one had a right to see the
other
in me. Since the glori-ous days when we marched into Paris, I’d felt nothing but anxiety.

Slowly, like a man reaching a difficult decision, I got up and opened the wardrobe. How long had it been since I’d worn the suit with the little checks? I discovered a moth hole, luckily in an inconspicuous spot. I took the suit off the hanger and held the coat in front of my chest.

“You could be an office worker,” I said to the mirror. “Or a waiter whose shift is over. Maybe you work in a bookshop. You A P R I L I N P A R I S . 15

paste little labels onto book covers and run errands.” I glanced at my shelves—half the books were French. I’ll put one of them under my arm, I thought, and go where lots of people stroll about.

There would be less danger that way.

I got the dry sausage and an apple from the drawer. The bread crumbled when I broke it. I sliced the sausage with my clasp knife and ate slowly. Had the boy they were interrogating really stolen the carburetors? He’d merely been seen in the area. Five buses for prisoner transport, and not one of them would start; the carburetors were missing. I observed my hands as I cut the sausage. The boy’s blood had dried on his skin. I stopped chewing. A sudden realization: In civilian clothes, you won’t get out of the hotel. I listened to my heartbeat. If rue des Saussaies learns about this, I thought, your ass is cooked.

I wiped my mouth on the towel, stood up, reached into the wardrobe, and took out the cloth bag I usually used to carry my laundry. In the room above mine, Hirschbiegel began to play music. “Ma Pomme.” I buttoned up my uniform and pulled on my boots.

I met a Luftwaffe lieutenant and his female companion on the stairs. I came to attention; he looked past me.

“Dans quelques minutes, j’ai temps pour toi,”
the lieutenant said, awkwardly stringing the words together.

“Pour faire quoi?”
the woman asked with a laugh.

At the reception desk, the sentry was talking to the toilet attendant, a young woman who spoke a few words of German. The sentry offered her some sweets. The chocolate bars were stuck together, and he grinned; her eyes remained serious. I walked down 16 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

the hall, carrying my bag. The walls were painted dark brown, with scratches and scrapes from passing luggage. It was a corridor I walked through every day, but this time the exit seemed farther away with each step.

“Hey, soldier!”

I kept walking.

“Just a second, you!”

I turned my head, as though he couldn’t possibly be speaking to me.

“Hirschbiegel was asking for you!” the sentry called out.

“When?”

“He said he knocked on your door and you weren’t there.”

Through the glass, I saw a Luftwaffe major approaching the entrance.

“Thanks,” I called over my shoulder, got through the door in three steps, held it open for the major, and stood ramrod-straight until he reached the reception desk. The toilet attendant disappeared into her niche.

I hurried through the streets, as though I had some particular place to go. In spite of the sun, a cold east wind was blowing, stirring up dust as it passed. Golden seeds were stuck in horse manure.

Scraps of paper circled in the air. To get my excitement under control, I murmured the names of the streets. When I passed a damaged building slated for demolition, I slowed down and looked around. A first glance made me think the place had taken a direct hit. Part of the facade hung over the sidewalk, and the support beams were ready to give way at any moment. I stepped into the entryway. Burst water pipes gaped in the remains of the walls. I lisA P R I L I N P A R I S . 17

tened, wiped dust off a ledge, and laid out my suit. It was an awkward process, getting out of my boots in a standing position; I hopped around and made more noise than I liked. Then I stuffed my uniform coat and trousers into the bag. For a few seconds, I stood in my underwear in the empty corridor. Steps from outside scared me, and I tried to take refuge in the collapsed stairwell. But whoever it was walked on by. Not daring to take off my ID tags, I just threw them over my shoulder so that they hung down my back, and then I quickly slipped on my shirt and pants and tied my shoes.

My boots bulged in the laundry bag; I would have been conspicuous, carrying something like that. I investigated the entrance hall.

The stairway curved up into a blind spot where no light fell. I addressed a quick prayer to the heavens and shoved the bag into the darkness. I was about to put on my soft felt hat when, at the last moment, I spotted the label—Klawischnigg & Söhne, München. I bit the thread off, ripped out the little strip of cloth, and threw it away. I pulled the hat down low over my forehead.

I walked out into the street as
another.
I’d laid aside all my privileges; I was defenseless against both occupiers and occupied.

I must not show my papers or speak my language.
One
false word would betray me. And by 7:30 at the latest, I had to metamor-phose back into my former self. All the same, I didn’t take my watch, an heirloom engraved with a German inscription.

The first thing I wanted was a new name, and before I could figure out why and wherefore, I opted for Antoine. Monsieur Antoine, assistant bookseller. I took the small volume out of my pocket: La Fontaine’s
Fables.
The book gave me security; it reinforced my biography. Monsieur Antoine, out for a stroll. Only a 18 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R