Shalimar the Clown (22 page)

The city’s charm was no defense. It ran deep, there were subterranean tunnels of charm underground, subterranean charm hospitals and charm canteens in case of need, and so there were those who had allowed themselves to believe that nothing much would change, the Germans had been here before, after all, and this time as on previous occasions the city would bewitch them and shape them to its ways. Max senior and Anya Ophuls succumbed slowly to this fantasy of a Maginot Line of charm, and their son despaired of them. Gauleiter Wagner, he pointed out, was not a charming man. His parents put on serious expressions and nodded gravely. All of a sudden, when he hadn’t been looking, they had become very old and frail, deteriorating sharply with the same simultaneity with which they had lived the greater part of their married lives. They had always belittled their difficulties, but in the past their lightness had had an undercurrent, a knowing, ironic intelligence. That undercurrent had disappeared. What remained was a sort of foolishness, a forgetting, happy sort of unwisdom. They laughed a great deal and whiled away the days playing card and board games in the shrouded house, behaving as if the times were not out of joint, as if it were an excellent idea that the house was largely shuttered up and the population had fled and the street names were being Germanized and the speaking of the French language and the Alsatian dialect had been forbidden. “Well, dear, we do all speak Hochdeutsch, don’t we, so there’s no difficulty, is there,” Anya said when Max junior brought her the language news. And when Wagner’s minions banned the wearing of the beret, calling it an insult to the Reich, old Max told his son, “I never thought it suited you anyway; wear a trilby instead, there’s a sensible fellow,” and returned to his game of solitaire.

Some days, Max thought his parents believed they could behave the Nazis out of existence, could make them disappear by simply treating them as if they weren’t there. At other times it was clear that they were losing their hold on things, slipping out of the world and into a region of dreams, sliding charmingly and uncomplainingly toward senility and death.

The university district was as deserted as the rest of the city but a couple of bars somehow managed to stay open. One of these was Le Beau Noiseur, and as the desire for resistance grew among the city’s remaining residents this became one of the places where interested parties met. Bill, Blandine, Max and a few others were regulars. Afterwards the innocence and openness of those early days would strike everyone as the height of insanity. The group openly referred to itself as
les noiseurs,
“the squabblers.” Yet in spite of such foolhardiness its members managed surprising feats. After the French surrender Blandine, for example, became an ambulance driver and visited several internment camps near Metz, where French soldiers were being interrogated before being released and sent home. Nobody paid this tiny woman in uniform much attention, with the result that as she distributed food and medicines she was able to learn a good deal about German troop and supply movements. The problem was that she didn’t know who to give the information to; which did nothing to sweeten her disposition. Her irritability was greater than ever, her tongue sharper, and most of her worst barbs were aimed at Max. The clumsy, hurried episode at the print shop was never repeated, nor did she allude to it. It was evident now that she and Bill were married, though neither of them wore a ring. Max filed away the memory of the sexual encounter, and eventually managed to forget it altogether. Then, twenty years later, while he was researching the period for a book, he made the chance discovery that in the vicious death-throes of the Nazi phase, when the Allies were sweeping across France after the successful D-Day landings, Blandine—real name Suzette Trautmann—had been captured in a refitted garage basement trying to send messages to the liberating army on a ham radio set, and had been executed on the spot. In the breast pocket of her shirt was a passport-sized photograph of an unknown man. The photograph had not survived.

Suppose it was me in that photo, Max suddenly thought. Suppose all those tongue-lashings were inverted signs of love, coded pleas for me to do what she could not do herself: to tear her away from her marriage and make off with her into some impossible wartime Eden. He tried to set aside these speculations, which were only a form of vanity, he scolded himself. But the possibility of misunderstood love went on eating away at him. Blandine, Blandine, he thought. Men are fools. No wonder we made you so mad. That afternoon in the archives when he discovered Suzette Trautmann’s fate he promised himself that if a woman ever sent him such signals again, if a woman were ever trying to say please, let’s get out of here, please please let’s run away and be together forever and to hell with the damnation of our souls,
please,
he would not fail to decipher the secret code.

He never found out what happened to Bill.

By the fall of 1940, the camps outside the city were being readied for guests, and, right on cue, the citizens of Strasbourg started returning to the city, under German instructions. Tens of thousands of young men, the so-called
malgré-nous,
were quickly pressed into front-line service in the German army. Max Ophuls understood that, paradoxically, now that everyone was home, however temporarily, it was time for him and his family to leave. The new homes being prepared near Schirmeck at Natzweiler-Struthof, intended for homosexuals, communists and Jews, sounded like a step down in the world. (The gas chamber being constructed down the road from the Struthof facility was still a secret.) It had not been possible to go to the printing works on the quai Mullenheim for some time now, and the family’s money shortage had forced Max to pawn and sell quantities of the Ophuls jewelry and silver. These would be gone soon, and with them the best chance of escape, for which substantial finances would almost certainly be required. Silver was the easiest thing to fence; melted down and anonymous, it told no tales about its provenance. Jewelry carried with it the higher risk of being classified as a looter, a charge carrying the death penalty; so in those confused days before the underworld reestablished its systems, even spectacular pieces, offered in exchange for a pittance, might be refused by the city’s ever-prudent pawnbrokers, those perpetual weathercocks of the winds of change. When the jewels could be fenced—jewels on whose true value the family could have lived for decades—the prices were so low that they barely paid for a week’s worth of essential provisions. Possessions were the past, and the future was arriving rapidly, and nobody had time—or cash—for yesterdays.

Thus far the Art & Aventure works had not been raided or seized by the city’s new authorities, but it was only a matter of time. Max did his best to conceal his forging materials from view, finding a number of ingenious hiding places both at the quai Mullenheim and at home, but a thorough search might easily uncover some damning cache, and after that . . . well, he preferred not to imagine what might happen after that. This increasingly uneasy and precarious state of affairs lasted until the spring of 1941. Then, one evening at Le Beau Noiseur, Bill told Max in whispers that an escape route had been readied for use, and that he and his parents had been selected to make the first run. Members of the faculty and student body of Strasbourg University
—les non-jamais—
had refused to return to the “Motherland,” the Gross Reich, and had remained in internal exile in Clermont-Ferrand, in spite of the risk of being declared deserters by the Germans. The vice-chancellor, a certain Monsieur Dungeon, had somehow persuaded Vichy officialdom to maintain the Strasbourg University at this “external campus,” and for the moment the Germans were prepared to let Pétain’s people have their way. A history professor named Zeller, assisted by student and teacher volunteers, and with some help from the Clermont-Ferrand military governor, had spent the summer building a large “country cottage” at Gergovie, near the well-known Gallo-Roman excavations, about which Bill knew nothing except that they were well known. “You leave tonight,” Bill said, passing him a piece of paper. “If your family can reach Gergovie, you will be contacted there and given new orders.” Max Ophuls kept a poker face throughout this briefing, telling Bill nothing he did not need to know, keeping his university connections to himself. Gaston Zeller, he thought. It will be good to see his ugly mug again.

He left the café without looking back. At home his parents had taken the dust sheets off the grand piano in the main drawing room and Anya was playing from memory, smiling beatifically, even though the instrument was harshly out of tune. Max senior stood behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders, his eyes closed, his expression distant and serene. Their son interrupted their reverie. “The day has come,” he said. “It’s time for us to run.” The elderly couple looked as if the universe had quivered slightly; then his mother put on her sweetest smile. “Oh, but it’s out of the question, dear,” she said. “You know that our dear friend Dumas’s son Charles receives his
bachot
tomorrow. We’ll talk about going once that’s done with.”

This was a dreadful statement. Charles Dumas was thirty, the same age as the younger Max, and not in Strasbourg. The day of their
baccalauréat
graduations was long past. “But you promised,” Max said, in great distress. “You said that if I ever came to you with this warning, you would do as I asked.” His father inclined his head. “It’s true we made a promise,” he said. “And you rightly stress the importance of our having given our word. Thus two great principles are in conflict here: honesty and friendship. We prefer to be good friends to our friends, and stay here for their family’s important day, even if that makes us dishonest in your eyes.” “For God’s sake,” shouted Max the younger, “there’s no such ceremony—you know perfectly well that all the schools and colleges have been closed since the evacuation, and even if they weren’t, this isn’t the right time of year. . . .” Anya Ophuls prepared to resume playing the piano. “Shh, shh, my darling, for goodness’ sake,” she admonished him. “It’s just one day. The day after tomorrow we’ll pick up those bags we packed and scurry off to wherever you see fit.”

There was nothing for it but to acquiesce. On the piece of paper Bill had given Max at the bar was the location of the rendezvous point, a stable in a remote corner of the Bugatti estate in the village of Molsheim, and the word
Finkenberger,
which Max had always thought of as the name of a local wine, not a particular man. He took this to be the pseudonym of the
passeur,
the man who would be responsible for facilitating the run and getting the Ophuls family across enemy lines. That night, a moonless night which had no doubt been selected on account of its unusual darkness, Max bicycled twenty kilometers down the so-called wine road to Molsheim to inform M. Finkenberger that there would be a twenty-four-hour delay in the plan. The choice of meeting place was risky because the Bugatti factory was now in German hands; but then again, there were no risk-free places that fall. Molsheim, a beauty spot with old-world cobbled streets and leaning Geppetto houses, was so utterly charming that you expected to see blue fairies at its windows and the new Disney movie’s already famous talking cricket on its hearths. Tonight, however, the tragedy of the Bugatti family lay over the village like a shroud, darkening the unmooned darkness until it felt like a blindfold. The closer Max came to the great estate the darker it grew, until he had to dismount from his bicycle and grope his way forward like a blind man.

Within the space of a single year the legendary car designer Ettore Bugatti, “Le Patron,” had suffered the loss first of his son Jean—in an automobile accident—and then his father Carlo, who died just before the German invasion, as if reluctant to be a part of that future. Ettore had been living in Paris, and although he remained the company’s engineering genius, Jean had for several years been in charge of the coachwork design, the distinctive curved fenders, the futuristic body shapes. After his son’s death Ettore returned to the quasi-baronial Molsheim factory-estate, where all the buildings—even the pattern shop, the body shops, the foundry, the drafting room—boasted great, polished doors of oak and bronze. The Bugattis had lived in feudal splendor. There was a sculpture museum, a carriage museum, luxurious facilities for their Thoroughbred horses, a riding school. They kept prize terriers, prime cattle, racing pigeons. They had their own distillery, and housed clients in a spectacular residence, the Hotel of the Pure Blood. The grandeur of the private world he had built served only to twist the knife in Ettore’s heart, magnifying the sudden emptiness of his life. Within a few months of his return he sold out to the Germans—was forced to do so—and left Molsheim with the air of a man emerging from a tomb. He moved his manufacturing operations to Bordeaux, but no Bugatti cars were ever built again; Ettore now made crankshafts for Hispano-Suiza aircraft engines. Less well known was his work with the Resistance, into which many of his former employees followed their benevolent but dictatorial boss. One such employee, the leathery old horse trainer now known to Max Ophuls as the
passeur
Finkenberger, was waiting at the end of a tiny wooded dead-end lane behind the stable, sitting on a fence post, smoking. Max stumbled down the lane, colliding with other fence posts and sadistic trees, trying not to cry out. The lighted tip of Finkenberger’s cigarette was his beacon, and he swam toward it through the eyeless darkness like Leander in the Hellespont. When the horse man first spoke it was as if the night’s curtain had been torn. Around the words, Max Ophuls began to be able to see or at least imagine a face, which to his great surprise turned out to be familiar. “Fuck me,” were the waiting man’s first words. “I know you, don’t I?
Fuck.
”

Max Ophuls had been on close terms with Jean Bugatti, had learned to fly planes with him, performing daredevilry in the innocent prewar sky. They had also ridden the length and breadth of this formerly blessed countryside on golden stallions across brilliant summer afternoons. Tonight, exhausted, filled with trepidation, Max was rushed back to that happier time by the unmistakable, obscene tongue of the
passeur.
“Ophuls, Max,” he said. “And sure, I know you, Finkenberger. Who could forget.” The other offered a cigarette, which Max declined. “Everything’s gone to fuck,” the horse trainer confided. “Nazis want to use the shop to build guns, obviously. Cunts. But they like the dogs and horses and of course they want to drive the fucking cars. I see a 57-5 with that fucking swastika flying on the hood, I want to fucking throw up. Fucking gutter rats playing at being aristos. Fucking pond scum. And that hotel, I always thought the name was a mistake. They fucking love that place. Hotel of the Pure Blood. It’s a fucking whorehouse now. Why are you alone, anyway? I was told three persons.”