Kingdom of Shadows (9 page)

“You’ve been to Paris?”

“No.”

On the tenth of May 1938, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after 9:20
P.M.
It was, on the whole, a quiet evening in Europe, cloudy and warm for the season, rain expected toward dawn. Nicholas Morath, traveling on a Hungarian diplomatic passport, stepped slowly from the first-class car and headed for the taxi rank outside the station. Just as he left the platform he turned, as though he was about to say something to a companion, but, on looking back, he discovered that whoever he’d been with had disappeared into the crowd.

VON SCHLEBEN’S WHORE

T
HE BAR OF THE
B
ALALAIKA, A LITTLE AFTER THREE, THE DUSTY, TIRED
air of a nightclub on a spring afternoon. On the stage were two women and a man, dancers, in tight black clothing, harassed by a tiny Russian wearing a pince-nez, hands on hips, stricken with all the hopelessness in the world. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips together, a man who’d been right about everything since birth. “To leap like a Gypsy,” he explained, “is to leap like a Gypsy.” Silence. All stared. He showed them what he meant, shouting “Hah!” and throwing his arms into the air. He thrust his face toward them. “You,
love,
life!”

Boris Balki was leaning on his elbows, the stub of a blunt pencil stuck behind his ear, a half-completed crossword puzzle in a French newspaper spread out on the bar. He looked up at Morath and said, “Ça va?”

Morath sat on a stool. “Not too bad.”

“What can I get for you?”

“A beer.”

“Pelforth all right?”

Morath said it was. “Have one with me?”

Balki’s eyebrow raised a fraction as he got the bottles from beneath the counter. He opened one and poured the beer into a tilted glass.

Morath drank. Balki filled his own glass, looked down at his puzzle, flipped the page, took a look at the headlines. “Why I keep buying this rag I don’t know.”

Morath read the name upside down. It was one of the friskier Parisian weeklies: sexy gossip, risqué cartoons, photos of lurid chorus girls, pages of racing news from Auteuil and Longchamps. His name had once, to his shame and horror, appeared in it. Just before he met Cara he’d been going around with a second-rank movie star, and they’d called him “the Hungarian playboy Nicky Morath.” There’d been neither a duel nor a lawsuit but he’d considered both.

Balki laughed. “Where do they get this stuff? ‘There are currently twenty-seven Hitlers locked up in Berlin insane asylums.’ ”

“And one to go.”

Balki flipped the page, took a sip of his beer, read for a few moments. “Tell me, you’re Hungarian, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, it says here, now you have a law against the Jews.”

The last week in May, the Hungarian parliament had passed a law restricting Jewish employment in private companies to twenty percent of the workforce.

“Shameful,” Morath said. “But the government had to do something, something symbolic, or the Hungarian Nazis would have staged a coup d’état.”

Balki read further. “Who is Count Bethlen?”

“A conservative. Against the radical right.” Morath didn’t mention Bethlen’s well-known definition of the anti-Semite as “one who detests the Jews more than necessary.”

“His party fought the law,” Balki said. “Alongside the liberal conservatives and the Social Democrats. ‘The Shadow Front,’ they call it here.”

“The law is a token,” Morath said. “Nothing more. Horthy brought in a new prime minister, Imredy, to get a law passed and quiet the lunatics, otherwise—”

From the stage, a record of Gypsy violins. One of the woman dancers, a ginger blonde, raised her head to a haughty angle, held a hand high, and snapped her fingers. “Yes,” the tiny Russian cried out. “That’s good, Rivka, that’s
Tzigane!
” He made his voice husky and dramatic and said, “What man will dare to take me.” Morath, watching the dancer, could see how hard she was trying.

“And the Jews?” Balki said, raising his voice above the music. “What do they think?”

“They don’t like it. But they see what’s going on in Europe, and they can look at a map. Somehow the country has to find a way to survive.”

Disgusted, Balki flipped back to the crossword and took the pencil from behind his ear. “Politics,” he said. Then, “a wild berry?”

Morath thought it over. “Maybe
fraise des bois
?”

Balki counted the spaces. “Too long,” he said.

Morath shrugged.

“And you? What do you think?” Balki said. He was back to the new law.

“Of course I’m against it. But one thing we all know is that if the Arrow Cross ever takes power, then it
will
be like Germany. There will be another White Terror, like 1919. They’ll hang the liberals, the traditional right,
and
the Jews. Believe me, it will be like Vienna, only worse.” He paused a moment. “Are you Jewish, Boris?”

“I sometimes wonder,” Balki said.

It wasn’t an answer Morath expected.

“I grew up in an orphanage, in Odessa. They found me with the name ‘Boris’ pinned to a blanket. ‘Balki’ means ditch—that’s the name they gave me. Of course, Odessa, almost everybody’s
something.
Maybe a Jew or a Greek or a Tartar. The Ukrainians think it’s in the Ukraine, but people in Odessa know better.”

Morath smiled, the city was famously eccentric. In 1920, when French, Greek, and Ukrainian troops occupied Odessa during the civil war, the borders of the zones of occupation were marked by lines of kitchen chairs.

“I basically grew up in the gangs,” Balki said. “I was a Zakovitsa. Age eleven, a member of the Zakovits gang. We controlled the chicken markets in the Moldavanka. That was mostly a Jewish gang. We all had knives, and we did what we had to do. But, for the first time in my life, I had enough to eat.”

“And then?”

“Well, eventually the Cheka showed up. Then
they
were the only gang in town. I tried going straight, but, you know how it is. Zakovits saved my life. Got me out of bed one night, took me down to the dock, and put me on a Black Sea freighter.” He sighed. “I miss it sometimes, bad as it was.”

They drank their beer, Balki working on the puzzle, Morath watching the dance rehearsal.

“It’s a hard world,” Morath said. “Take, for instance, the case of a friend of mine.”

Balki looked up. “Always in difficulties, your friends.”

“Well, that’s true. But you have to try and help them out, if you can.”

Balki waited.

“This one friend of mine, he has to do business with the Germans.”

“Forget it.”

“If you knew the whole story, you’d be sympathetic, believe me.” He paused, but Balki was silent. “You lost your country, Boris. You know what that feels like. We’re trying not to lose ours. So it’s what you just said, we’re doing what we have to do. I’m not going to be a
conard
and offer you money, but there is money in this, for somebody. I can’t believe you won’t put them in the way of it. At least, find out what the offer is.”

Balki softened. Everybody he knew needed money. There were women, out in Boulogne where the Russian émigrés lived, going blind from doing contract embroidery for the fashion houses. He gestured with his hands, helpless.
Je m’en fous—I’m fucked no matter what happens.

“Old story. German officer in Paris, needs girlfriend.”

Balki was offended. “Someone told you I was a pimp?”

Morath shook his head.
It’s not like that.

“Tell me,” Balki said. “Who are you?” He meant,
what are you?

“Nicholas Morath. I’m in the advertising business. You can look me up in the telephone book.”

Balki finished his beer. “Oh, all right.” He gave in, more to some fate he thought he had than to Morath. “What’s the rest of it.”

“Pretty much as I said.”

“Monsieur Morath—Nicholas, if you don’t mind—this is Paris. If you want to fuck a camel, all it takes is a small bribe to the zookeeper. Whatever you want to do, any hole you can think of and some you can’t, it’s up in Pigalle, out in Clichy. For money, anything.”

“Yes, I know. But, remember what happened to Blomberg and Fritsch”—two generals Hitler had gotten rid of, one accused of a homosexual affair, the other married to a woman rumored to have been a prostitute. “This officer can’t be seen to have a mistress. Boris, I don’t know the man, but my friend tells me he has a jealous wife. They both come from stodgy old Catholic families in Bavaria. He can be ruined. Still, here he is in Paris, it’s everywhere, it’s all around him, in every café, on every street. So he’s desperate to arrange something, a liaison
.
But it must be discreet. For the woman, for the woman who, tells absolutely nobody and understands what’s at stake without being told too much and makes him happy in the bargain, there’s a monthly arrangement. Five thousand francs a month. And, if everybody’s satisfied, more over time.”

That was a lot of money. A schoolteacher earned twenty-five hundred francs a month. Balki’s face changed, Morath saw it. No more Boris the bartender. Balki the Zakovitsa.

“I don’t handle the money.”

“No.”

“Then maybe,” Balki said. “Let me think it over.”

Juan-les-Pins, 11 June.

Her breasts, pale in the moonlight.

Late at night, Cara and her friend Francesca, holding hands, laughing, rising naked from the sea, shining with water. Morath sat on the sand, his pants rolled to midcalf, feet bare. Next to him, Simon something, a British lawyer, said, “My God,” awed at the Lord’s work running up the beach toward them.

They came down here every year, around this time, before the people showed up. To what they called “Juan.” Where they lived by the sea in a tall, apricot-colored house with green shutters. In the little village where you could buy a Saint-Pierre from the fishermen when the boats returned at midday.

Cara’s crowd. Montrouchet from the Théâtre des Catacombes, accompanied by Sloth. A handsome woman, ingeniously desirable. Montrouchet called her by her proper name, but to Morath she was Sloth and always would be. They stayed at the Pension Helga, up in the pine forest above the village. Francesca was from Buenos Aires, from the Italian community in Argentina, the same as Cara, and lived in London. Then there was Mona, known as Moni, a Canadian sculptor with an apartment in Paris, and the woman she lived with, Marlene, who made jewelry. Shublin, a Polish Jew who painted fire, Ilsa, who wrote small novels, and Bernhard, who wrote poems about Spain. And others, a shifting crowd, friends of friends or mysterious strangers, who rented little cabins in the pines or took cheap rooms at the Hôtel de la Mer or slept under the stars.

Morath loved the Cara of Juan-les-Pins, where the warm air heated her excessively. “We will be up very late tonight,” she would say, “so we will have to rest this afternoon.” A wash in the sulphurous, tepid water that trickled into the rust-stained tub, then sweaty, inspired love on the coarse sheet. Half asleep, they lay beneath the open window, breathing the pine resin on the afternoon wind. At dusk, the cicadas started, and went on until dawn. Sometimes they would take a taxi up to the restaurant on the
moyenne
corniche above Villefranche, where they brought you bowls of garlicky
tapenade
and pancakes made of chickpea flour and then, finding you at peace with the world and unable to eat another bite, dinner.

Too proud and Magyar for beach sandals, Morath ran to the sea at noon, burning his feet on the hot pebbles, then treading water and staring out at the flat horizon. He would stay there a long time, numb as a stone, as happy as he ever got, while Cara and Francesca and their friends stretched out on their towels and glistened with coconut oil and talked.

“Half past eight in Juan-les-Pins, half past nine in Prague.” You heard that at the Bar Basque, where people went in the late afternoon to drink white rum. So the shadow was there, darker on some days, lighter on others, and if you didn’t care to take measurements for yourself, the newspapers would do it for you. Going to the little store for a
Nice Matin
and a
Figaro,
Morath joined the other addicts, then went to a café. The sun was fierce by nine in the morning, the shade of the café umbrella cool and secret. “According to Herr Hitler,” he read, “ ‘The Czechs are like bicycle racers—they bow from the waist but down below they never stop kicking.’ ” In June, that was the new, the fashionable, place for the war to start, Czechoslovakia. The
Volksdeutsch
of the old Austrian provinces, Bohemia and Moravia—the Sudetenland—demanded unification with the Reich. And the
incidents,
the fires, the assassinations, the marches, were well under way.

Morath turned the page.

Spain was almost finished now—you had to go to page three. The Falange would win, it was only a matter of time. Off the coast, British freighters, supplying Republican ports, were being sunk by Italian fighter planes flying from bases in Majorca.
Le Figaro
had reproduced a British editorial cartoon: Colonel Blimp says, “Gad sir, it is time we told Franco that if he sinks another 100 British ships, we shall retire from the Mediterranean altogether.”

Morath looked out to sea, a white sail in the distance. The fighting was heavy seventy kilometers north of Valencia, less than a day’s drive from the café where he drank his coffee.

Shublin had gone to Spain to fight, but the NKVD kicked him out. “The times we live in,” he said at the Bar Basque one evening. “The rule of the invertebrates.” He was in his thirties, with curly blond hair, a broken nose, and tobacco-stained fingers with oil paint under the nails. “And King Adolf will sit on the throne of Europe.”

“The French will smash him.” Bernhard was German. He had marched in a Communist demonstration in Paris and now he couldn’t go home.

“Still,” said Simon the lawyer. The others looked at him, but he wasn’t going to make a speech. A sad smile, that was it.

The table was at the edge of the dance floor, which was liberally dusted with sand and pine needles brought in by the wind. It blew hard off the sea, smelled like a jetty at low tide, and fluttered the tablecloths. The little band finished playing “Le Tango du Chat” and started up on “Begin the Beguine.”

Bernhard turned to Moni. “You have danced this ‘Beguine’?”

“Oh yes.”

“You have?” Marlene said.

“Yes.”

“When was that?”

“When you weren’t there to see.”

“Oh yes? And when was
that
?”

“Dance with me, Nicky,” Sloth said and took him by the arm. They did something not unlike a fox-trot, and the band—
Los Tres Hermanos
was printed in script on the bass drum—slowed down to accomodate them. She leaned against him, heavy and soft. “Do you stay up late, when you’re here?”