The Third Reich (21 page)

This was the perfect situation, everything I could have asked for, and I hardly noticed the time passing. I think we might have sat across from each other like that all night, our eyes scarcely meeting and her hand clasped in mine, but everything comes to an end, and this time the end arrived in the form of the night watchman, who, after searching for me all over the hotel, appeared on the terrace with the message that I had a long-distance phone call.

Frau Else got up wearily and followed me down the empty corridor to the reception desk. She ordered the watchman to take out
the last bags of garbage from the kitchen and we were left alone. The immediate sensation was of being on an island, just the two of us, except for the receiver lying there offthe hook, like a cancerous appendage that I would happily have ripped out and handed to the clerk like another piece of garbage.

It was Conrad. When I heard his voice my disappointment was great, but then I remembered that I’d asked him to call me.

Frau Else sat on the other side of the counter and tried to read a magazine that I suppose the clerk had left behind. She couldn’t. Nor was there much to read because it was almost all photographs. With a mechanical gesture she dropped it on the edge of the desk, where it rested precariously, and pinned her gaze on me. Her blue eyes were the shade of a child’s colored pencil, a cheap and beloved Faber.

I felt like hanging up and making love to her right there. I imagined myself—or maybe I’m imagining it now, which makes it worse—dragging her to her private office, lifting her up on the desk, ripping offher clothes and kissing her, climbing on top of her and kissing her, turning offall the lights again and kissing her . . .

“Ingeborg is fine. She’s working. She doesn’t plan to call you, but she says that when you get back she wants to talk to you. She asked me to say hello to you,” said Conrad.

“Fine. Thanks. That’s what I wanted to know.”

With her legs crossed, Frau Else was gazing at the tips of her shoes now and seemed immersed in labored and complicated thoughts.

“Listen, your letter never came. It was Ingeborg, this afternoon, who explained everything to me. As far as I can see you’re under no obligation to stay there.”

“Well, when you get my letter, you’ll understand. I can’t explain anything to you now.”

“How’s the match going?”

“I’m screwing him three ways from Thursday,” I said, though maybe the expression was “He’s shafted” or “I’m tearing him a new one” or “He’s getting a good hosing,” I honestly can’t remember now.

Maybe I said: I’m roasting him alive.

Frau Else gave me a soft look that I’d never seen a woman give and smiled at me.

I felt a kind of shiver.

“You haven’t bet anything?”

I heard voices, maybe in German, I couldn’t say for sure, unintelligible conversations and computer sounds, far, very far away.

“Nothing.”

“I’m glad. All afternoon I was worried that you’d bet something. Do you remember our last conversation?”

“Yes, you suggested he was the devil. I’m not senile yet.”

“Don’t get all worked up. I only have your best interests at heart, you know.”

“Of course.”

“I’m glad you haven’t bet anything.”

“What did you think was on the table? My soul?”

I laughed. Frau Else had one tanned and perfect arm raised in the air, ending in a hand with long, slender fingers that closed around the night clerk’s magazine. Only then did I realize that it was pornography. She opened a drawer and put it away.

“The Faust of war games.” Conrad laughed like an echo of my own laugh bouncing back from Stuttgart.

I felt a cold rage rise up my spine from my heels to my neck and shoot into every corner of the room.

“It’s not funny,” I said, but Conrad didn’t hear me. I hadn’t been able to muster more than the faintest of voices.

“What? What?”

Frau Else got up and came over, so close that I thought that she could hear Conrad’s cackling. She put a hand on my head, and immediately she could feel the rage boiling inside me. Poor Udo, she whispered. Then, with a velvety gesture, as if in slow motion, she pointed to the clock indicating that she had to leave. But she didn’t go. Maybe it was the desperation she saw in my face that stopped her.

“Conrad, I don’t feel like kidding around, I’m not in the mood, it’s late. You should be in bed, not up worrying about me.”

“You’re my friend.”

“Listen, at some point the sea will puke up whatever’s left of Charly. Then I’ll pack my bags and come back. To kill time while I’m waiting, just to kill time and get examples for my article, I’m playing
Third Reich
; you’d do the same, wouldn’t you? Anyway, the only thing I’m jeopardizing is my job, and you know that’s crap. I could find something better in less than a month. Yes? Or I could devote myself exclusively to writing essays. I might even come out ahead. It might be fate. In fact, being fired might be the best thing that could happen to me.”

“But they don’t want to fire you. And I know you care about the office, or at least the people you work with. When I was there they showed me a postcard you’d sent them.”

“You’re wrong, I don’t give a shit about them.”

Conrad choked back a groan, or at least that’s what I thought I heard.

“It’s not true,” he parried, very sure of himself.

“What do you want? Honestly, Conrad, sometimes you’re a fucking pain in the ass.”

“I want you to come back to your senses.”

Frau Else brushed my cheek with her lips and said: It’s late, I have to go. I felt her warm breath on my ears and neck, a spider’s embrace, light and disturbing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the watchman at the end of the hallway, docile, waiting.

“I have to hang up,” I said.

“Should I call you tomorrow?”

“No, don’t waste your money.”

“My husband is waiting for me,” said Frau Else.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does.”

“He can’t fall sleep until I’m there,” said Frau Else.

“How is the match going? Did you say it’s autumn of ’40? Have you invaded the USSR?”

“Yes! Blitzkrieg on all fronts! He’s no match for me! For Christ’s sake, am I the champ or aren’t I?”

“Of course, of course . . . And I hope with all my heart that you win . . . How are the English doing?”

“Let go of my hand,” said Frau Else.

“I have to go, Conrad. The English are in trouble, as always.”

“And your article? Going well, I suppose. Remember that it would be ideal if it’s published before Rex Douglas gets here.”

“If nothing else, it’ll be written. Rex is going to love it.”

Frau Else tried to pull her hand away.

“Don’t be childish, Udo. What if my husband comes in?”

I covered the receiver so that Conrad couldn’t hear and I said:

“Your husband is in bed. I suspect that’s his favorite place. And if he isn’t in bed he’s probably at the beach. That’s another one of his favorite places, especially after dark. Not to mention the guest rooms. In fact, your husband manages to be everywhere at once. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were spying on us right now, hiding behind the watchman. The watchman’s shoulders aren’t broad, but your husband, I believe, is thin.”

Frau Else’s gaze turned instantly toward the end of the corridor. The watchman was waiting, leaning against the wall. In Frau Else’s eyes I caught a glimmer of hope.

“You’re crazy,” she said when she had determined that no one was watching, before I pulled her to me and kissed her.

I don’t know how long we kissed, first urgently and then lazily. I know that we could have gone on forever but I remembered that Conrad was on the phone and that time was ticking away and eating a hole in his pocket. When I lifted the receiver to my ear I heard the chattering of thousands of crossed lines and then emptiness. Conrad had hung up.

“He’s gone,” I said, and I tried to drag Frau Else with me toward the elevator.

“No, Udo, good night,” she said, rejecting me with a forced smile.

I insisted that she come with me, though frankly without much conviction. With a motion of her hand that at the time I didn’t understand, a dry, authoritarian gesture, Frau Else had the watchman step between us. Then, in a new tone of voice, she said good night to me again and disappeared . . . toward the kitchen!

“What a woman,” said the night watchman.

The watchman went behind the desk and searched for his magazine in the drawers. I watched him in silence until he had it in his hands and had gone to sit on the leather armchair in the reception area. I sighed, with my elbows on the desk, and asked whether there were many tourists left at the Del Mar. Lots, he answered without looking at me. Above the shelf of keys there was a big, long mirror in a heavy golden frame that looked like something out of an antiques shop. Reflected in it were the lights of the corridor and, lower down, the back of the watchman’s head. I felt a kind of queasiness upon realizing, however, that my own reflection wasn’t visible. Slowly and somewhat fearfully, I slid to the left along the desk. The watchman looked at me, and after a moment of hesitation he asked why I had said “those things” to Frau Else.

“None of your business,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said with a smile, “but I don’t like to see her suffer, she’s so good to us.”

“What makes you think she’s suffering?” I said, still sliding toward the left. My palms were sweating.

“I don’t know . . . The way you treat her . . .”

“I care for her deeply and have the greatest respect for her,” I assured him, as gradually my image began to appear in the mirror, and although what I saw was rather unpleasant (wrinkled clothes, flushed cheeks, tousled hair), it was still me, alive and tangible. A stupid fear, I realize.

The watchman shrugged and turned as if he were about to go back to his magazine. I felt relief and a deep weariness.

“This thing . . . is it a trick mirror?”

“What do you mean?”

“The mirror. A minute ago I was directly in front of it and I couldn’t see myself. It’s only now, off to the side, that I’m reflected. And you’re sitting beneath it but I can see you in it.”

The watchman turned his head without getting up and looked at himself in the mirror. He made a face: he could see himself and he didn’t like his looks and that struck him as funny.

“It’s a little bit tilted, but it’s not a trick mirror; look, there’s a wall here, see?” Smiling, he lifted the mirror and touched the wall as if he were stroking a body.

For a while I reflected on the matter in silence. Then, after vacillating, I said:

“Let’s see. Stand here.” I pointed to the exact place where I hadn’t been reflected before.

The watchman got up and stood where I told him to.

“I can’t see myself,” he acknowledged, “but that’s because I’m not in front of the mirror.”

“Yes you are, damn it,” I said, getting behind him and turning him to face the mirror.

Over his shoulder I had a vision that made my pulse quicken: I heard our voices but I couldn’t see our bodies. The objects in the corridor—an armchair, a big jar, the spotlights that shone from the juncture of the ceiling and the walls—looked brighter in the mirror than they did in the real corridor behind me. The watchman let out a compulsive giggle.

“Let go of me, let go, I’ll prove it to you.”

Without intending to, I had him immobilized in a kind of wrestling hold. He looked feeble and afraid. I let him go. In a leap the watchman was behind the counter and he pointed at the wall where the mirror hung.

“It’s slanted. Slanted. It’s not straight. Come over here and see for yourself.”

When I stepped through the gap in the counter my equanimity and caution spun like the blades of a crazed windmill; I think I was ready to wring the poor watchman’s neck. Then, as if I were suddenly waking up to a new reality, Frau Else’s scent enveloped me. Everything was different back there—outside the laws of nature, I’d venture to say—and it smelled like her even though the rectangle behind the reception desk wasn’t physically separated from the broad and—by day—heavily trafficked hall. The mark of Frau Else’s serene passage lingered and that was enough to calm me.

After a cursory examination I could see that the watchman was right. The wall on which the mirror hung didn’t run parallel to the counter.

I sighed and let myself fall into the leather armchair.

“So white,” said the watchman, surely referring to my pallor, and he began to fan me calmly with the pornography magazine.

“Thanks,” I said.

After a few interminable minutes I rose and went up to the room.

I was cold, so I put on a sweater and then I opened the windows. From the balcony I could see the lights of the port. A soothing spectacle. The port and I tremble in unison. There are no stars. The beach looks like a black hole. I’m tired and I don’t know how I’ll get to sleep.

SEPTEMBER 8

Winter 1940. The First Russian Winter Gambit should be played when the German Army has penetrated deep into the Soviet Union so that the German position, together with the adverse weather, favors a decisive counterattack able to destabilize the front and create pincer movements and pockets. In short: a counterattack that makes it necessary for the German Army to retreat. For this to happen, however, it’s essential that the Soviet Army have enough reserves (not necessarily armored reserves) to launch such a counterattack. In other words, where the Soviet Army is concerned, in order to use the First Russian Winter Gambit with any likelihood of success one must have maintained at least twelve factors along the border during the Autumn Unit Construction phase. Where the German Army is concerned, playing the First Russian Winter with a high degree of confidence implies something crucial about the war in the East, something that annihilates any Russian defenses: the destruction, in each and every previous turn, of the maximum number of factors of Soviet force. Thus the First Russian Winter is rendered innocuous, which, in the worst of cases, only slows the German Army’s advance into Russia, and, where the Soviets are concerned, means an instant reordering of priorities: instead of seeking to fight, it must retreat, leaving large swaths of land to the enemy army in a desperate attempt to remake its borders.