Shalimar the Clown (23 page)

Max explained the problem and there was an abrupt change of mood. The darkness itself seemed to tighten, to gather itself into a pair of clenched fists. Finkenberger threw away his cigarette and, to judge by his breathing, seemed to be making an effort to suppress his rage. Finally he spoke. “Le Patron, he left Molsheim and fucked off to Paris because he thought the workers weren’t grateful. Old school, he is. Take your fucking cap off when he comes by, touch the fucking forelock, bend the fucking knee, you catch my drift. And yeah, maybe there were those who weren’t grateful for the chance to behave like fucking serfs, even if they did get houses and benefits and such. There were those who weren’t too fucking grateful at all. Monsieur Jean was different. Common fucking touch. Had it in spades. Think yourself lucky you were his pal. If you weren’t his pal and came to me saying what you’re saying to me now I’d have told you to go fuck yourself. If you were one of Le Patron’s highfalutin pricks I’d have told you what you could fucking do with your twenty-four-hour delay. Do you know how fucking hard it is to set this stuff up, the danger of using the radio, the number of people waiting on you down the road that have to be stood down and stood up again tomorrow, do you know the fucking danger you’re putting them in? Fucking dilettante fuckers like you can’t think about anyone else. But you’re the lucky bastard, I say again, on account of Monsieur Jean, on account of his fucking beautiful fucking memory. Be here on time tomorrow the three of you or you can go fuck yourselves to death in the fucking synagogue on the fucking Sabbath day.”

In Strasbourg there were fires burning, and helmeted goon squads in the street. Max Ophuls went carefully, on foot, pushing his bike, hiding in shadows. When he saw the flames licking at Art & Aventure the fear began pounding in him, kneading him like dough. Long before he reached home he knew what he would find, the broken door, the wanton damage, the shit on the Biedermeiers, the daubed slogans, the urine in the hall. If the house had not been torched it could only be because some Nazi high-up wanted it for himself. All the lights were on and nobody was home. He went through the rooms one by one, darkening them, returning them to the night, letting them mourn. In the library with the three desks the destruction was very great, the books scattered and torn, a mound of them burned in the middle of the rug, a great charred heap of wisdom that somebody had pissed on to put it out. Desk drawers hung open. Gashed paintings hung askew in broken frames. He had brought his parents’ false papers home with him and had made the mistake of leaving them at home when he went on the errand that had temporarily saved him. The discovery of those documents increased his parents’ peril and doomed him as well. Nobody was home but by the end of this night of looting the house would have passed into enemy hands, like the Hotel of the Pure Blood. Nazi whores would loll where once his mother lay. He should leave. He should definitely leave at once. There was nobody home but that would change. He found a bottle of cognac that had somehow been spared. It lay unbroken in a corner next to a chaise between blowing curtains. He pulled out the cork and drank. Time passed. No, it did not pass. Time stood still. Beauty passed, love passed, bloody-mindedness and mulishness passed. Time stood still with its hands up. Stubborn bastards faded away.

After the war he found out how their story had ended. He learned the numbers burned into their forearms, memorized them and never forgot. The record showed that they had been used for medical experimentation. They were old and losing their reason and good for nothing and so a use had been found for them. After lifetimes lived mainly in their now-enfeebled minds they ended up as mere bodies, bodies that reacted this way to pain, this way to greater pain, this way to the greatest pain imaginable, bodies whose response to being injected with diseases was of interest, of high scientific interest. So they were interested in learning? Very well then. They had helped the advancement of knowledge in a valuably practical way. They never made it to the gas chamber. Scholarship killed them first.

Drunk, close to physical collapse, Max Ophuls got back on his bicycle and made the twenty-kilometer wine road dash for the third time that night. When he got back to Molsheim he realized he had no idea how to find the
passeur,
no idea which of the many workers’ cottages on the Bugatti estate might be his, didn’t even remember his real name. The night was no longer absolute; a hint of future color softened the black. More by luck than memory he found his way back to the small stable at the estate’s edge, an interim sort of place, a way station for tired riders, and wheeled his bicycle inside and passed out on the muddy floor in one of the stalls. This was where Finkenberger found him several hours later, in broad daylight, and shook him roughly, shouting curses into the sleeper’s ear. Max came awake fast and was frightened to find a horse nuzzling at him as if to determine whether he might be edible. Next to the horse’s head was Finkenberger’s head. Finkenberger by daylight was a jockey-sized gnome with a caustic face filled with bad and probably aching teeth. “You’re one lucky fuck,” he hissed at Max. “Gauleiter Wagner, the big cunt himself, was planning to ride here today, but it seems everybody wants twenty-four-hour delays right now.” Then he read the look on Max’s face and his manner changed. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, I’m sorry. Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I shit on myself for my insensitivity, I shit on their fascist grandmothers’ graves, I wish them shit for dinner in hell for all eternity.” He sat down in the mud and put his arm around Max, who was unable to cry. Then in a flash the
passeur
was all business, all questions and options. The escape route to the Zone Sud had been set up again, he had done that before going to sleep, but if the big round-ups had begun the risk factor had risen, was maybe unacceptable. Yes, of course he was confident of the route, but only as confident as it was possible to be, because this would be the first time and the first time is never sure. And if the bastards were in the middle of a big operation then there could be no guarantees but of course everyone would do his best. “That sounds good,” Max said bitterly. “Sure, let’s do that.” It was at that moment that Finkenberger the
passeur
had the idea that would make Max Ophuls one of the great romantic heroes of the Resistance: the Flying Jew.

At the beginning of the war Ettore Bugatti, along with the well-known aeronautical engineer Louis D. de Monge, designed a plane—the so-called Model 100—to break the world speed record, which a German Messerschmitt Me209 had raised to 469.22 miles per hour on April 26, 1939. As the threat of war grew Bugatti was given a contract to build a military version of the Racer, with two guns, oxygen cylinders and self-sealing fuel tanks. The plane was built in secret on the second floor of a Parisian furniture factory, but had never had the chance to fly. As the German armies marched on Paris, Ettore Bugatti had the plane lowered to the street, loaded it onto a truck and sent it out of the city and into hiding. “The Racer,” Finkenberger whispered to Max Ophuls, grinning his snaggletoothed grin. “I know where she is. If you can fly her, take her.”

She was hidden right under the enemy’s nose, in a hay barn on the estate. She could fly at over five hundred miles an hour, or that, at any rate, was what her designers believed. She was powered by two Bugatti T50B auto-racing engines, had forward-swept wings and a revolutionary system of variable wing geometry, a system of self-adjusting split trailing edge flaps that responded to airspeed and manifold pressure and then automatically set themselves into any of six different positions: takeoff, cruise, high-speed dash, descent, landing, rollout. She was fast, fast, fast, and painted Bugatti blue. Finkenberger brought Max to the barn after darkness made it safe to move again, and the two men worked silently for an hour and a half removing the camouflage of hay and netting and revealing the Bugatti Racer in all her glory. She was still standing on the truck that had brought her out of Paris, like a greyhound in the slips. Finkenberger said he knew a stretch of straight road nearby that would serve as a runway. Max Ophuls marveled at the Racer’s streamlined bullet beauty. “She’ll reach Clermont-Ferrand all right, but don’t go crazy, okay? No need to go for the fucking speed record,” Finkenberger said. “Now look and learn.” So he was more than a horse trainer, Max realized. Finkenberger was explaining the aircraft’s unorthodox engine/power arrangement, its canted engines, its counter-rotating propellers. The cooling system, the tail-fin control system: these, too, were innovations. “Nothing like her ever built,” Finkenberger said. “One of a fucking kind.”

“Can you authorize this?” Max Ophuls asked, his voice heavy with wonder, his thoughts already rushing skywards. “Her maiden flight will be an act of resistance,” Finkenberger replied, the blue language disappearing as he revealed a previously hidden streak of emotional patriotism. “Le Patron would not wish it otherwise. Just take her, okay? Take her before they find her. She needs to escape as well.”

The night flight of the Bugatti Racer from Molsheim to Clermont-Ferrand would become one of the grand myths of the Resistance, and in the whispered retelling it swiftly acquired the supernatural force of a fable: the impossible super-speed of the aircraft bulleting the black sky; the low-altitude streak toward freedom that only the most skillful and fearless pilot could have pulled off; the five-hundred-miles-per-hour barrier broken through for the first time in history as the world record was unofficially but unquestionably shattered, and, more important, reclaimed for France from the Germans, thus becoming a metaphor for the Liberation; the daring takeoff from a country road and the even more dangerous dark-of-the-moon landing on the grassy plain down which Julius Caesar’s legions had marched toward the oppidum of Gergovia, where Vercingetorix, the chief of the Arverni, defeated them.

Some of this was certainly true, but in later years Maximilian Ophuls himself seemed prepared to allow the myths to embellish the truth. Had he really broken the record in spite of Finkenberger’s warnings about fuel? Had he really flown at or near rooftop level all the way, or had he escaped radar detection by luck, and on account of the strong element of the unexpected in his dash? In his own memoir of the war years, Max Ophuls clarified nothing, speaking instead with a hero’s modesty of his great good fortune and of the many helpers without whom, and so on. “I thought of Saint-Exupéry,” he wrote. “In spite of the anxious situation I understood what he meant when he spoke in
Vol de nuit
of flying as a form of meditation.
That profound meditation in which one tastes an inexplicable hope.
Yes, yes. It was like that.”

Here, again, an ungenerous reader might perceive a calculated merging of Max’s own story with that of another beloved figure. In 1940 the writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry played a heroic part in the battle of France, then left with his squadron for North Africa, and later reached New York. He was already famous as the author of
Night Flight,
but when Max Ophuls in his memoir went on to reference a later Saint-Exupéry book he was guilty of anachronism. At the time of his own flight to Gergovia,
Pilote de guerre,
published in English as
Flight to Arras,
was still being written, and even after its publication a year later and its considerable American success it was banned by the Vichy government and the Gallimard edition of 1942 was suppressed. It was therefore impossible for Max Ophuls in the Bugatti Racer to have had any knowledge of its contents. In spite of these awkward details, Max Ophuls unashamedly set down his airborne reflections on a text of which he could not then have been aware.
“War, for us, signified disaster. But was it the case that France, to spare itself a defeat, had refused to fight? I do not believe it.”
Max reliving his own
vol de nuit
added approvingly, “As I whistled over the heads of my sleeping countrymen, I did not believe it either. France would soon awake.” The error wasn’t important. He got away with it. Even those critics who spotted the blunder said it was within the bounds of poetic license. A hero was a hero and deserved to be cut a little slack. Max’s book was highly praised and became a commercial success, notably in America. After all, by the end of the war Saint-Exupéry was dead, lost in action over Corsica, whereas Max Ophuls was a living flying ace and giant of the Resistance, a man of movie-star good looks and polymathic accomplishment, and in addition he had moved to the United States, choosing the burnished attractions of the New World over the damaged gentility of the Old.

Once he had landed, the aircraft was quickly concealed in the nearby forest by a small team of volunteers who were nicknamed the Gergovians and led by the redoubtable Jean-Paul Cauchi, the organizer of Combat Universitaire, also known as Combat Étudiant, the Resistance group based at the Strasbourg university-in-exile and answerable to Henri Ingrand, the Chief for Combat Region Six. Max was taken to the forest cottage where his colleagues vice-chancellor Danjon and the historian Gaston Zeller were waiting with a bottle of wine. As his personally forged papers were in the name of “Sebastian Brant” his arrival as part of the Strasbourgeois faculty would need some explanation. He would be described as a scholar from the south, and Danjon, who exercised an almost hypnotic power over the Nazi fellow travelers of Vichy, would square the paperwork. “But you took a stupid risk by giving yourself a well-known name,” Danjon chided him. “One might almost say you yourself traveled here in an airborne ship of fools.” The real Brant was the fifteenth-century Strasbourg author of
Stultifera Navis,
or
Das Narrenschiff
(1494), a satire of human follies illustrated in part by the young Albrecht Dürer. Ophuls spread his hands apologetically: yes, it was true, he had made an idiotic choice.

“It will pass muster,” Zeller reassured him. “Nobody you need to worry about round here does any reading at all.”

Not long after his arrival in Gergovie, Max acquired a second false identity. Hungry for revenge, he joined the Action Section of Combat Étudiant under the work-name “Niccolò” and learned about blowing things up. The first and only bomb he threw was built by an assistant named Guibert in the Institute of Chemistry, and its target was the home of Jacques Doriot, a Vichy stooge who ran the pro-Nazi Doriot Association. The explosion—the gigantic excitement of the moment of power, followed almost immediately by a violent involuntary physical reaction, a parallel explosion of vomit—taught him two lessons he never forgot: that terrorism was thrilling, and that, no matter how profoundly justified its cause, he personally could not get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis. He was moved to the Propaganda Section and in the two years that followed went back to what he knew: the creation of false identities. “The reinvention of the self, that classic American theme,” he would write in his memoir, “began for me in the nightmare of old Europe’s conquest by evil. That the self can so readily be remade is a dangerous, narcotic discovery. Once you’ve started using that drug, it isn’t easy to stop.”