The Losing Role (17 page)

Felix said, “You want to get rid of your SS tunic, I
won’t hold it against you.”

“No, I’ll keep it on a while,” Max said.

Daylight was thinning, creating broad and dark
shadows. Back at the jeep Felix spread the maps out on the hood.
“So. We’re closer to the front than we thought. We are lost, but
not completely. Somewhere near a town called Malmedy. Here. Must be
it down the road. But we can’t drive through it, can we? I say we
make our way around.”

“Fine.” Max just wanted clear of this place.

“Far as opposition goes, we’ll just have to take
that MP’s word for it.”

“I believed him. What did he have left to lie
about?”

They would have to travel with the top down, since
the jeep’s canvas top was shredded. As an enlisted man, Felix would
drive. The jeep did not start. They opened the hood and stared at
the engine twice, for minutes on end, before realizing Zoock had
somehow removed the distributor cap. He’d placed it neatly on top
of the engine block.

Felix started up the jeep and, wrestling with the
clutch, steered them off the road and on through the gaps between
the trees. They drove through the woods to skirt the town, bouncing
and bumping shoulders, Max grasping at the windshield frame. As
twilight came a light fog set on the gullies and puddles. They
passed through an area hit hardest by the bombardments, a wasteland
of splintered stumps and black craters. The snowy earth had been
churned up to resemble salt and pepper. Toppled trees covered
foxholes, trenches, sandbagged artillery dugouts and timbered
command posts. It was like a garbage dump. Emptied crates, spent
shells, sandbags and satchels and helmets lay strewn about. Legs
and hands pointed to the sky, frozen. They heard no cries for help,
for the cold had taken care of those left whimpering.

The MP corporal spoke the truth. This sector was a
forgotten land.

The mess created a labyrinth for Felix, and he
steered them through in the lowest gear. Felix drifted into intense
thought. His eyes seemed to stop blinking. He cleared the woods and
found a road but still the journey was slow going. Patches of ice
spun the wheels. Felled logs and charred vehicles clogged their
path.

In two hours they traveled no more than ten miles.
Darkness fell. The wind had picked up. It was snowing again. They
stopped at a fire-scorched house with half a roof and a fallen
wall. Felix backed the jeep inside. Stiffly they climbed out, and
Max’s joints ached and popped. One room still had a bed over in a
dark corner. Max stretched out on it. Such cushy stillness was a
divine luxury.

Felix joined him. He’d brought cans of American
rations over. They sat up, their backs against the soft upholstered
headboard.

Felix handed Max a Lucky Strike. Max just stared at
it. “Why kill him?” he said.

“Who? Hartmut? You heard that MP—said
Amis
never travel four to a jeep. Not even three. That made us at least
two too many. There’s also the sad fact that he was going to get us
nabbed before we could do some real damage. I told you. He was in
the way.”

“You’ve been planning this.”

Felix lit his Lucky. His voice softened. “And you?
You, Zoock, me—I guess we’ve all been planning.”

Max said nothing.

“When we rode behind those German prisoners you
said: ‘I don’t want them giving me away’—meaning only you. I
remember that clearly.”

“You have a keen memory. Congratulations.” Max
lifted an imaginary champagne glass. “Back to Rattner. I suppose
there are many men to keep company with. Why him?”

Fritz shrugged. “He came to me. I didn’t make him.
Unfortunately, he was also a bastard. I’m telling you, sorry dogs
like him will be hopeless in the New Germany.”

“New Germany—you mean after all this? We’ll be lucky
if there’s any after,” Max said.

They opened their ration cans and shoved the cold
bland beans into their mouths. Then they reclined and lay back,
staring up through the gaps in the roof at passing clouds. “There
will be a new Germany, and it might just be the best thing that
ever happened to you,” Felix said. “Did you ever think of that, my
von Kaspar? Eh? You could recreate yourself. We all could. So you
shouldn’t fear the big change. Change is grand.”

Had Max heard noises? He’d been sleeping. His eyes
had popped open but he saw nothing. Where was he? On the bed. Still
in the house. His eyes adjusted, and he saw Felix’s silhouette in
the dark, the glow of his cigarette moving up and down. He was
standing over at the jeep.

“I was sleeping,” Max said.

“Yes. Snoring, too.”

“How long did I sleep?”

“Hour, maybe.”

“What are you doing over there?”

Felix sighed. He trudged over to the bed, sat, and
slumped. He began to speak, but his voice creaked. He tried again:
“You know, I assumed that batty redhead sailor would stick around
for the bitter end. He was going to come in handy.”

“No. Zoock, he had it all planned out, right down to
his silly accent. He wasn’t losing marbles. That was just a ruse to
throw off anyone who tried to track him down. Probably dyed that
red hair already. I would have.”

Max got up and wetted his face with cold canteen
water, jolting himself awake, and the events of that afternoon came
hurtling back. They had killed two American soldiers at close
range. Max let the only witness get away. Then they’d interrogated
and lynched their helpless prisoner. Max imagined the corpses
hardening under the snow—those two young black MPs, their freckled
leader, and even Captain Rattner, none more alive than carcasses
hanging in a butcher’s freezer. His little brother Harry had
freckles, Max remembered.

Zoock was the smart one. The sailor had his one shot
and he took it. He’d probably watched from behind trees as Max and
Felix sped away through the woods. Soon, Max imagined, Zoock would
hole up with some café owner’s daughter, tell her he was an
Américain déserteur
. They’d share a wondrous night together.
In the morning, he’d hitch a ride to the Meuse and on to Paris,
where he’d make a good go of it and earn enough for a new
identity—then a one-way ticket on an ocean liner. South America was
an option. Maybe by then the war would be over. It was all just as
Maximilian von Kaspar would have done. Yet von Kaspar was gone to
Max now. His days in theater were dead and he could never bring
them back. Passion itself was a pipe dream, a shot in the dark. He
was being dehumanized—
entmenschlicht
. The only truth he knew
was it was 7 o’clock in the evening on December 17, 1944, and
outside the snow was dumping down and piling up. He was mechanical.
He was
entseelt
—deprived of soul. He ran with goddamned
murderers.

His eyes burned. A tear dropped on his thumb and he
shook it off, sniffling. He dropped back down on the bed.

Beside him, Felix was sitting forward as if praying.
“America, she chewed me up,” he said.

“Say again?” Max wiped at his eyes.

“America chewed me up, and I hated America for that.
Yes.” Felix’s voice gained clarity as if he were reading aloud to
schoolchildren. He said, “And so I hated her for her ignorance, her
piety, and her seediness, for her wild optimism, for her
dog-eat-dog cruelty. And yet, I didn’t hate Americans for what they
are; I hated them for not shining even more than they do, and can.
They can be so much more. You see, Kaspar?” Max nodded, why not.
“Their potential is unlimited,” Felix continued, “But they squander
it. They could be supermen. Egyptians. Greeks. Romans.
Conquerors.”

Horse shit. That was the last thing the world
needed. Max nodded anyway. “They are perfect for the part. But they
don’t get the role,” he muttered.

“In truth? You want the truth? I was hating them for
all the ways they’re really too like me. Like us. By hating them, I
was really hating myself—for holding back. Now I’m not holding
back. You want to know why I fight on. Why I chant the slogans.
Call for blood and victory. It’s got nothing to do with Americans,
or the Brits, the mongrel Reds invading from the East. National
Socialism? That’s just a banner. It could be any banner as long as
it promised something . . .” Felix paused. “Max, sometimes I think
I must be from another age. I want something nobler. Bolder. Not
better. Not even idealistic, in the good sense. Just more, let us
say, romantic.”

Ruthless and primitive, were the words that came to
Max. “That can be a bitter pill,” he said.

“I’m not saying we’re alike, mind you. While you
were striving to be this cultured thespian of fine repute, there I
was wasting away in the seediest clubs and cabarets—joints so
degenerate, they easily survived the Nazi takeover.” Felix
snickered. “Now, with our Berlin-Rome burning, I suspect the old
haunts are thriving.”

They sat in silence. “America chewed me up, too,”
Max said finally. “Spit me out, as a matter of fact.”

Fifteen

New York City, 1937. Over three years gone here and
still in limbo. At least Max had Lucy Cage. They ice skated at the
new Rockefeller Center. They picnicked in Central Park. Sure, these
were the jaunts for tourists but they held such charm when he did
them with her. (Why did the best memories always include women?)
He’d go to her apartment after working late, and she’d be waiting
up for him, keeping the bed warm, sprawled out on her back with one
arm up close to her head as if she were waving. She called him
Maxie. He called her Luce. She made him chew gum with her. She made
him feel a part of this city. Instead of the din of cabs and
sirens, he noticed the dew glistening on stoops and the toothy
smiles of the shoeshine men, and how the steam danced and twirled
from sewer grates.

Lucy was a model for advertisements. Cigarettes. Ice
cream. You name it, she said. Once Max looked up on Fifth Avenue
and saw her giant face nuzzling a giant pillow, two stories up and
three stories tall, he couldn’t even remember the ad it was so
stunning. The gig went like this—she posed for an artist who drew
her and painted in the color later. Sometimes they just took a
photo and that was it, a half hour’s work. She liked that best—the
speed and convenience of it. Art was not a factor. Ambition barely
played a role. It was just for the money. To her it was just a
job.

Lucy got rejected lots of times. She just shrugged
it off. How can you do that? Max wondered. In Europe we show the
emotion, he told her.

“Apparently, you show it here too,” she said.

“All you got to do is adjust,” she said.

“Adjust, adjust—it’s easy when you’re born here. You
can’t adjust an accent.” How many times had he ranted about this?
It was the only thing they fought about. One time he threw a plate
at the wall, and then a coffee cup. And why not? His whole block
seemed to do it nightly.

And still the roles never came. His new agent was
little help. Constantly he complained about the émigrés’ stilted
style. “Big European names, they said—sure, but the salt water it
seemed to shrink ‘em.”

The only thing stopping Max was his accent. If he
could fix that, all else would follow.

His new agent was skeptical. “The accent, it’s got
to be near perfect if you want to break out,” he said. “Mocking is
one thing. To be is another.”

Max could be whatever he wanted, he decided. He went
to the cheap matinees and watched the same films over and over,
attuning himself to the American English sounds. Often he sat alone
in the top corner of the balcony and sounded out the words. At home
he repeated Lucy’s sentences until they were dead on.

Lucy kidded him, “Honey, you don’t want to sound
like me. Who wants to see a German saying ‘says you’ and ‘big lug.’
It ain’t right, you know? Got no class.”

In America, class was only how wealthy you were.
Heritage and profession played little role. He had to prove himself
anew every day. Meanwhile, he had to eat, and it wasn’t getting any
easier. He had many jobs:

Funny waiter.

House servant.

Clothing factory—cutting buttonholes and pressing
garments.

Guard in an insane asylum, of all things.

He could keep few of them. The funny waiter was in a
club that still had vaudeville acts. He was expected to fall and
spill on himself to get the customers laughing. He got the laughs,
but they wanted him to wear an Imperial German helmet with a spike
on top and a large Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. It was the only job he
quit. The clothing factory job was tough. The steam and heat made
his skin pink and tender all over, and the sewing machines made
such a racket his ears rang. They told him not to come back one
day. “My cousin needs a job,” said the foreman, “and, well, you
know how it is?” The strangest job was the asylum. It was an
overnight shift. The hulking head nurse mistook him for one of the
inmates once, and that was that.

Meanwhile, the émigrés were pouring in from a
troubled Europe—more leftists and Jews from Germany and Austria,
Italy and Spain. The more recent the arrival, the more bitter their
take on the future. Many mistrusted Max. What was he doing here
anyway, a gentile German? Some considered him an agent of the
Gestapo, or in the least somewhat cracked in the head. Didn’t he
know there was a war looming?

Other émigrés talked of killing themselves. The
writers were the worst. The older ones were serious about it. Max
knew a middle-aged couple from Vienna who jumped together from
their shabby apartment. She had a PhD. He’d won prizes for
literature. Neighbors found them smashed into the roof of a
Packard, still holding hands.

Nevertheless, Max’s American English was improving.
He’d lost the
ach
and
bitte
and
Mein Gott
,
mastered the “th” and “w,” and adopted a refined, Mid-Atlantic
intonation that all the better actors were doing. Lucy told him so.
“Oh Maxie, you sound so like Claude Rains. It’s dreamy to be
sure.”