The Third Reich (3 page)

Dinner was light. Ingeborg changed clothes. A white dress, white high heels, a mother-of-pearl necklace, and her hair pulled up in a loose twist. I dressed in white too, though not as elegantly.

The club was on the side of town near the campgrounds, a neighborhood of clubs, burger stands, and restaurants. Ten years ago there was nothing here but a few places to camp and a pine forest that stretched all the way to the train tracks; today apparently it’s the town’s main tourist district. The bustle of its single street, which runs along the shore, is like that of a big city at rush hour. With the difference that here rush hour begins at nine in the evening and doesn’t end until after three. The crowd that gathers on the pavement is motley and cosmopolitan: white, black, yellow, Indian, mixed, as if all the races had agreed to vacation here, although I suppose not everyone is on vacation.

Ingeborg was at her most radiant, and when we walked into the club we were greeted with covert admiring glances. Admiring of Ingeborg and envious of me. Envy is something I always pick up on right away. Anyway, we didn’t plan to spend much time there. And yet, as fate would have it, before long a German couple sat down at our table.

Let me explain how it happened. I’m not crazy about dancing. I do dance, especially since I met Ingeborg, but first I have to loosen up with a couple of drinks and grow accustomed to the discomfort I feel among so many strange faces in a room that usually isn’t very well lit. Ingeborg, meanwhile, has no qualms about going out alone to dance. She might head to the dance floor for a few songs, stop back at the table, take a sip of her drink, return to the dance floor, and so on all night until she drops from exhaustion. I’ve gotten
used to it. While she’s gone I think about my work and meaningless things, or I hum the tune that’s playing over the sound system, or I meditate on the unknown fates of the amorphous masses and the shadowy faces that surround me. Sometimes Ingeborg, ignorant of all this, comes up and gives me a kiss. Or she appears with new friends—like the German couple tonight—with whom she has barely exchanged a few words in the shuffle of the dance floor. Words that when taken together with our common state as vacationers are enough to establish something resembling friendship.

Karl—though he prefers to be called Charly—and Hanna are from Oberhausen. She works as a secretary at the company where he’s a mechanic; both are twenty-five. Hanna is divorced. She has a three-year-old son, and she plans to marry Charly as soon as she can. She told all this to Ingeborg in the ladies’ room and Ingeborg told it to me when we got back to the hotel. Charly likes soccer, sports in general, and windsurfing: he brought his board, which he raves about, from Oberhausen. At one point, while Ingeborg and Hanna were on the dance floor, he asked me what my favorite sport was. I said I liked to run. Alone.

Both of them had had a lot to drink. So had Ingeborg, to tell the truth. Under the circumstances, it was easy to agree that we would get together the next day. Their hotel is the Costa Brava, which is just a few steps from ours. We planned to meet around noon, on the beach, next to the place where they rent the pedal boats.

It was close to two in the morning when we left the club. On our way out, Charly bought a last round. He was happy; he told me they’d been in town for ten days and hadn’t made any friends. The Costa Brava was full of English tourists, and the few Germans he’d met at bars were either unfriendly or single men traveling in groups, which excluded Hanna.

On the way home, Charly began to sing songs that I’d never heard before. Most of them were crude; some referred to what he planned to do to Hanna when they got back to their room, by which I deduced that the lyrics, at least, were made up. Now and then Hanna, who was walking arm in arm with Ingeborg a little way ahead of us, would laugh. My Ingeborg laughed too. For an instant
I imagined her in Charly’s arms and I shuddered. My stomach shrank to the size of a fist.

Along the Paseo Marítimo a cool breeze was blowing, and it helped to clear my head. The only people to be seen were tourists returning to their hotels, stumbling or singing, and the few cars to pass in either direction moved slowly, as if the whole world were suddenly exhausted or sick and everything now flowed toward bed and dark rooms.

When we got to the Costa Brava, Charly insisted on showing me his surfboard. He had it strapped with a web of cords to the luggage rack of his car in the outdoor parking lot of the hotel. What do you think? he asked. There was nothing special about it, it was a board like a million others. I confessed that I knew nothing about windsurfing. If you want I can teach you, he said. We’ll see, I answered, without making any promises.

We refused to let them walk us back to our hotel, and Hanna was in complete agreement. Still, the farewell was prolonged. Charly was much drunker than I realized and insisted that we come up to see their room. Hanna and Ingeborg laughed at the silly things he said, but I remained unmoved. When at last we had convinced him that it was best if we all went to bed, he pointed at something on the beach and went running offinto the darkness. We all followed him: first Hanna (who was surely used to this kind of scene), then Ingeborg, then me reluctantly bringing up the rear. Soon the lights of the Paseo Marítimo were behind us. On the beach the only sound was the noise of the sea. Far away to the left I made out the lights of the port where my father and I went one morning, very early, in a fruitless attempt to buy fish: in those days, at least, the selling took place in the afternoon.

We began to call his name. Our shouts were all that could be heard in the darkness. Without meaning to, Hanna stepped in the water and soaked her pants up to the knee. It was then, more or less, as we listened to Hanna curse—her pants were satin and the salt water would ruin them—that Charly answered our calls: he was between us and the Paseo Marítimo. Where are you, Charly? shouted Hanna. Here, over here, follow my voice, said Charly. We set out again toward the lights of the hotels.

“Watch out for the pedal boats,” warned Charly.

Like creatures of the deep, the pedal boats formed a black island in the uniform darkness of the beach. Sitting on the floater of one these strange vehicles, with his shirt unbuttoned and his hair disheveled, Charly was waiting for us.

“I just wanted to show Udo the exact place we’re meeting tomorrow,” he said, when Hanna and Ingeborg scolded him for the fright he’d given them and for his childish behavior.

As the women helped Charly up, I observed the group of pedal boats. I couldn’t say exactly what it was about them that caught my attention. Maybe it was the strange way that they were arranged, which was unlike anything I’d seen before in Spain, though Spain is hardly a regimented country. At the very least, the way they were set up was illogical and impractical. The normal thing, even accounting for the whims of the average pedal boat proprietor, is to point them away from the sea, in rows of three or four. Of course, there are those who point them toward the sea, or arrange them in a single long line, or don’t line them up, or drag them against the seawall that separates the beach from the Paseo Marítimo. The way that these were positioned, however, defied explanation. Some faced the sea and others the Paseo, though most lay on their sides with their noses toward the port or the campground zone in a kind of jagged row. But even odder was that some had been turned on their sides, balancing only on a floater, and there was even one that had been overturned entirely, with the floaters and the paddles pointing skyward and the seats buried in the sand, a position that not only was unusual but must have required considerable physical strength, and that—if it hadn’t been for the strange symmetry, for the clear intent that emanated from the collection of boats half covered by old tarps—might have been taken as the work of a bunch of hooligans, the kind who roam the beaches at midnight.

Of course, neither Charly nor Hanna nor even Ingeborg noticed anything out of the ordinary about the pedal boats.

When we got back to the hotel, I asked Ingeborg what she thought of Charly and Hanna.

Good people, she said. I agreed, with reservations.

AUGUST 22

The next morning we ate at the café, La Sirena. Ingeborg had an English breakfast of milky tea, a fried egg, two strips of bacon, baked beans, and a grilled tomato, all for 350 pesetas, much cheaper than at the hotel. On the wall behind the bar there’s a wooden mermaid with red hair and bronzed skin. Old fishing nets still hang from the ceiling. Otherwise, everything is different. The waiter and the woman behind the bar are young. Ten years ago an old man and an old woman, dark skinned and very wrinkled, worked here; they used to talk to my parents. I couldn’t bring myself to ask after them. What good would it do? The new people speak Catalan.

We met Charly and Hanna at the agreed-upon place, near the pedal boats. They were asleep. After we spread our towels out next to them, we woke them up. Hanna opened her eyes right away but Charly grunted something unintelligible and kept sleeping. Hanna explained that he’d had a rough night. When Charly drank, according to Hanna, he didn’t know when to stop, which wasn’t good for him or his health. She said that at eight, after hardly sleeping, he had gone out windsurfing. And there was the board, lying next to Charly. Then Hanna compared suntan lotions with Ingeborg, and after a while, with the sun toasting their backs, their conversation turned to some guy from Oberhausen, a manager who it seemed had taken a serious interest in Hanna although she liked him only
“as a friend.” I stopped listening and spent the next few minutes examining the pedal boats that had so disturbed me the night before.

There weren’t many of them on the beach; most, already rented, were moving about slowly and erratically on the water, which was calm and deep blue. Certainly there was nothing disturbing about the pedal boats still waiting to be rented. They were old, outdated even in comparison to the boats at neighboring rental spots, and the sun seemed to glint offtheir pitted and peeling surfaces. A rope, strung from a few sticks driven into the sand, separated bathers from the area set aside for the boats. The rope hung scarcely a foot from the ground and in some places the sticks were listing and about to fall over completely. On the shore I could make out the rental guy helping a group of vacationers launch their boat, at the same time making sure it didn’t hit one of the countless children splashing around. The renters, about six of them, all perched on the pedal boat and carrying plastic bags that might hold sandwiches and cans of beer, waved toward the beach or slapped each other on the back in jubilation. When the pedal boat had made its way through the fringe of children, the rental guy came out of the water and headed our way.

“Poor man,” I heard Hanna say.

I asked to whom she was referring; I was told to take a closer look without being obvious about it. The rental guy was dark, with long hair and a muscular build, but the most noticeable thing about him by far were the burns—I mean burns from a fire, not the sun— that covered most of his face, neck, and chest, and that he displayed openly, dark and corrugated, like grilled meat or the crumpled metal of a downed plane.

For an instant, I must admit, I was hypnotized, until I realized that he was looking at us too and that there was an indifference in his gaze, a kind of coldness that suddenly struck me as repulsive.

After that I avoided looking at him.

Hanna said that she would kill herself if she ended up like that, scarred by fire. Hanna is a pretty girl, with blue eyes and brown hair, and her breasts—neither Hanna nor Ingeborg was wearing
her bikini top—are large and shapely, but it didn’t take much effort for me to imagine her covered in burns, screaming and wandering blindly around her hotel room. (Why, precisely, around her hotel room?)

“Maybe it’s a birthmark,” said Ingeborg.

“Maybe. You see the strangest things,” said Hanna. “Charly met a woman in Italy who was born without hands.”

“Really?”

“I swear. Ask him. He slept with her.”

Hanna and Ingeborg laughed. Sometimes I don’t understand how Ingeborg can find this kind of talk funny.

“Maybe it was a birth defect.”

I don’t know whether Ingeborg was talking about the woman without hands or the rental guy. Either way I tried to convince her that she was wrong. No one is born like that, with such ravaged skin. At the same time, it was clear that the burns weren’t recent. They probably dated back five years, or even more to judge by the attitude of the poor guy (I wasn’t looking at him), who had clearly grown used to attracting the same interest and stares as monsters and the mutilated, glances of involuntary revulsion, of pity at a great misfortune. To lose an arm or a leg is to lose a part of oneself, but to be burned like that is to be transformed, to become someone else.

When Charly woke up at last, Hanna told him she thought the rental guy was good-looking. Great biceps! Charly laughed and we all went swimming.

After lunch that afternoon I set up the game. Ingeborg, Hanna, and Charly headed to the old part of town to go shopping. During lunch, Frau Else came over to our table to ask whether we were enjoying ourselves. She gave Ingeborg a frank and open smile, although when she spoke to me I thought I detected a certain irony, as if she were saying: you see, I care about your well-being, I haven’t forgotten you. Ingeborg thought she was a pretty woman and wondered how old she was. I said I didn’t know.

How old must Frau Else be? I remember my parents said that she had married the Spaniard—whom incidentally I still haven’t seen—when she was very young. The last summer that we were here she must have been about twenty-five, around the same age as Hanna, Charly, and me. Now she’s probably thirty-five.

After lunch the hotel lapses into a strange lethargy. Those who aren’t going to the beach or on an outing fall asleep, overcome by the heat. The staff, except for those stoically tending bar, vanish and aren’t seen on the hotel grounds until past six. A sticky silence reigns on every floor, interrupted from time to time by the low voices of children and the hum of the elevator. At times one has the impression that a group of children has gotten lost, but that’s not the case; it’s just that their parents can’t bring themselves to speak.