The Polish Officer (18 page)

“Careful with him, Alexander.”

Noontime, the late July day hot and still. The German naval staff had chosen for its offices a financier’s mansion near the Hôtel Bristol, just a few steps off the elegant Faubourg St.-Honoré. Lezhev waited in a park across the street as naval officers in twos and threes trotted briskly down the steps of the building and walked around the cobbled carriage path on their way to lunch. When Freddi Schoen appeared outside the door of the mansion and peered around, Lezhev waved.

“You’re certain this will be acceptable?” Freddi Schoen asked, as they walked toward the river.

“I’m sure,” Lezhev said. “Everything’s going well?”

“Ach yes, I suppose it is.”

“Every day something new?” Lezhev said.

“No. You’d have to be in the military to understand. Sometimes a superior officer will really tell off a subordinate. It mustn’t be taken to heart—it’s just the way these things have always been done.”

“Well then, tomorrow it’s your turn.”

“Of course. You’re absolutely right to see it that way.”

They walked through the summer streets, crossed the Seine at the place de la Concorde. Parisians now rode about on bicycle-cart affairs, taxi-bicycles that advertised themselves as offering “Speed, comfort, safety!” The operators—only yesterday Parisian cabdrivers—had changed neither their manners nor their style; now they simply pedaled madly instead of stomping on the accelerator.

“Are you hard at work writing?” Schoen asked.

“Yes, when I can. I have a small job at Parthenon, it takes up most of my time.”

“We all face that.” They admired a pair of French girls in frocks so light they floated even on a windless day. “Good afternoon, ladies,” Schoen said with a charming smile, tipping his officer’s cap. They ignored him with tosses of the head, but not the really serious kind. It seemed to make him feel a little better. “May I ask what you are writing about these days?”

“Oh, all that old Russian stuff—passion for the land, Slavic melancholy, life and fate. You know.”

Schoen chuckled. “You keep a good perspective, that’s important, I think.”

They reached the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter, one of the centers of Parisian arts, and Parisian artiness as well. The cafés were busy; the customers played chess, read the collaborationist newspapers, argued, flirted, and conspired in a haze of pipe smoke. Freddi Schoen and Lezhev turned up a narrow street with three German staff cars parked half on the sidewalk. Schoen was nervous. “It won’t be crowded, will it?”

“You won’t notice.”

They climbed five flights of stairs to an unmarked door that stood open a few inches. Inside they found nine or ten German officers, hands clasped behind their backs or insouciantly thrust into pockets, very intent on what they were watching. One of them, a Wehrmacht colonel, turned briefly to see who’d come in. The message on his face was clear: do not make your presence evident here, no coughing or boot scraping or whispering or, God forbid, conversation.

At the far end of the room, lit by a vast skylight, Pablo Picasso, wearing wide trousers and rope-soled Basque espadrilles, was sketching with a charcoal stick on a large sheet of newsprint pinned to the wall. At first the shape seemed a pure abstraction, but then a horse emerged. One leg bent up, head turned sideways and pressed forward and down—it was not natural, not the way a horse’s body worked. Lezhev understood it as tension: an animal form forced into an alien position. Understood it all too well.

“My God,” Freddi Schoen whispered in awe.

The colonel’s head swiveled round, his ferocious eye turning them both to stone as Picasso’s charcoal scratched across the rough paper.

2 August. Occupation or no occupation, Parisians left Paris in August: streets empty, heat flowing in waves from the stone city. A telephone call from Freddi Schoen canceled lunch near the Parthenon Press office. Too busy.

4 August. Late-afternoon coffee. But not on the Faubourg St.-Honoré. The addition of extra staff, he apologized, had forced his department to find new, likely temporary, quarters: a former college of pharmacy not far from the wine warehouses at the eastern end of the city.

7 August. A soirée to celebrate Freddi Schoen’s new painting studio in the Latin Quarter. Cocktails at seven, supper to follow. Invitations had been sent out in late July, but now the arrival time was changed. Telephone calls from a German secretary set it for eight. Then nine-thirty. Freddi Schoen did not appear until eleven-fifteen, pale and sweaty and out of breath.

The paintings, hung around the room and displayed on three easels, weren’t so bad. They were muddy, and dense. The landscapes themselves, almost exclusively scenes of canals, might have been, probably were, luminous. But light and shadow were unknown to Freddi Schoen. Here you had woods. So. There you had water. So. The former was green. The latter was blue. So.

After a few glasses of wine, Freddi shook his head sadly. He could see. “In the countryside it is right there before you, right there,” he said to Lezhev. “But then you try to make it on the canvas, and look what happens.”

“Oh,” said Lezhev, “don’t carry on so. We’ve all been down this road.”

It was, Lezhev could tell, the
we
that thrilled Freddi Schoen—he was one of them. “It’s time that helps,” he added, the kindly poet.

“Time!” Freddi said. “I tell you I don’t have it—some of these I did when everybody else was eating lunch.”

“Let me fill your glass,” Genya said. Her kindness was practiced—she’d been soothing frantic writers since girlhood, by now it was second nature. She well knew the world where nothing was ever good enough. So, nothing was. So what?

Freddi Schoen smiled gratefully at her, then some German friends demanded his attention. Genya leaned close to Lezhev and said, “Can you take me home when this is over?”

Clothes off, laid on a chair along with Lezhev’s personality. A relief after a day that seemed a hundred hours long. De Milja stared at the ceiling above Genya’s bed, picked over the evening, decided that he hadn’t done all that well. I’m a
mapmaker,
he thought. I can’t do these other things, these deceptions. All he’d ever wanted was to show people the way home—now look what he’d become, the world’s most completely lost man.

Not his fault that he was cut off from the Sixth Bureau in London—he was improvising, doing the best he could, doing what he supposed they would have wanted done and waiting for them to reestablish contact.
Yes, but even so,
he said to himself. This wasn’t an operation, it was an, an
adventure.
And he suspected it wasn’t going to end well for anybody.

But, otherwise, what?

“Share this with me,” Genya said. He inhaled her breath and perfume mixed in the smoke. She had a dark shadow on her upper lip, and a dark line that ran from her naval to her triangle. Or at least that’s where it disappeared, like a seam. He traced it gently with his fingernail.

She put the cigarette out delicately, took the ashtray off the bed and put it on the night table. Then she settled back, took his hand and put it between her legs and held it there. Then she sighed. It wasn’t a passionate sigh, it simply meant she liked his hand between her legs, and not much else in the world made her happy, and the sigh was more for the second part of the thought than the first. “Yes,” she said, referring to the state of affairs down below, “that’s for you.”

Of course in a few hours she would spy for him, if that was what he wanted. The
schleuh—
the Germans—couldn’t just be allowed to, well, they couldn’t just be allowed. This was France, she was French, she’d sung the national anthem in school with her little hand on her little breast—excuse her, her little heart. If the world demanded fighting, she’d fight. Just the instant they got out of bed. What? Not quite yet?

“France spreads her legs” he’d once said in a moment of frustration. Yes, she supposed it rather did, everybody had always said so. They’d said so in
Latin,
for God’s sake, so it must be true. Did he not, after all, approve of spread legs? Did he not wish to spread her legs? Oh, pardon her,
évidemment
a mistake on her part. And did he also find France, like her, duck-assed? What did that mean? It meant this.

There was an English pilot, shot out of the sky in the early raids over France, they had heard about him. He’d been taken in by farmers up in Picardy, where they’d lost everything to the Germans in the last war. They knew that trained pilots were weapons, just like rifles or tanks. Not innocent up there. So they passed him along, from the curé to the schoolmistress to the countess to the postman, and he went to ground in Paris in late June, just after the surrender. Certainly he would be heading back to England, there to fight once more. How else could he arrange to be shot down and killed—a fate which had danced maddeningly out of reach on the previous try.

Only, he didn’t want to be put on the escape route down to the Pyrenees, guided across to freedom by patriots, or sold to the Spanish police by realists—it all depended these days on whom one happened to meet. Then he met Sylvie or Monique or Francette or whoever it was, and he decided that Paris might be, even hidden out, just the very place to spend the war. Because he’d learned a terrible truth about the Germans: unless you were a Jew they wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t bother them. The French understood that right away.

So the pilot stayed hidden, and he chanced to gamble, and he chanced to win a racehorse. And, the second week in July, the racetracks opened. Goebbels had ordered that France return to merriment and gaiety or he’d have them all hanged, so the racetracks joined the whorehouses and the movie theaters, which had closed for twenty-four long hours the day the Germans arrived. The pilot’s horse won. And won again. It ran like the wind—a good idea for a horse in a city with horsemeat butchers and rationed beef. And the English pilot was in no hurry at all to go home.

That was one answer to the question
what should we do about the Germans.
Genya Beilis stood naked at the window and pulled the blackout curtain aside so she could see the sky. “My God, the stars,” she said.

He rolled off the damp sheet and stood by her, their bare skin touching. He bent his knees in order to see above the roof across the street, a medieval clutter of chimneys and broken slates and flowerpots, and there was the sky. There was no city light, the summer heavens were satin black with a sweep of white stars. “Look,” she said.

15 August. Ninety-five degrees in the street. They had no idea what it was in the attic under the copper-sheeted roof, amid trunks and piles of gauze curtains, stacks of picture frames and a dressmaker’s dummy, all of it the color of dust. The BBC had a particular, very identifiable, sound to it, and they worried about neighbors, or people passing in the street. Some Parisians had seen right away that Germans should be treated like other visitors; groomed and fed and milked. The characteristic British voice, amid the static and hiss, meant there was a “terrorist” or a “Bolshevik” in the neighborhood, and you could get a damn good price for one of those if you knew who to talk to down at the local police station.

It was too hot and dirty for clothes, so they stripped at the foot of the narrow staircase and climbed up in their underwear. They sat on a sprung old sofa that somebody had covered with a sheet, and put the radio on the floor, with picture wire run up into the eaves as an aerial. In the evening, when reception was marginally better, Genya would stare into space as she concentrated on the radio voice; bare brown arms clasping her knees, hair limp in the humid summer air, sweat glistening between her breasts.

Midnight in the century,
someone called that time, and she was the perfect companion for it. He was lucky, he thought, that at the end he had a woman to be with. Because the end had pretty clearly come. First Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland. Then France. Now England. It wasn’t a question of if, only how. And then a matter—not uncomplicated—of working out your personal arrangements with what was called the New Europe.

On the subject of the immediate future, two French generals had recently been heard from. Weygand, who’d helped the Poles beat the Russians in 1920, had said that the Germans would “wring England’s neck like a chicken.” De Gaulle, a former defense minister, had surfaced in London and was trying to sell the French the idea of resistance, while
L’Humanité,
the communist newspaper, called him a British agent, and advised French workers to welcome German soldiers and to make them feel at home.

On the sweltering evening of 15 August, the BBC had “music for dancing, with the Harry Thorndyke Society Orchestra from Brighton,” then the news: “In the skies over Britain today, more than one thousand five hundred sorties were flown against various targets, met by hundreds of RAF fighter planes and turned back.”

Then, Harry Thorndyke himself: “Good evening, everybody. Good evening, good evening. Tonight, we thought it might be just the thing to pay a call on Mr. Cole Porter—thank you, thank you—and so now, without further ado, why don’t we just . . . ‘Begin the Beguine’?”

Genya flopped over on her stomach, hands beneath her chin. They listened to the music in silence for a while, then she said, “How long will it take?”

“A few weeks.”

“Perhaps the English planes can win.”

“Perhaps. But the German planes are probably better.”

“We French had fighter planes, you know. Made by a certain Monsieur Bloch—and very rich he got, too. They were known as ‘
cerceuils volants,
’ flying coffins, but nobody thought it mattered. An opportunity for the French pilots to show how much more skillful and courageous they were than their German opponents, who had superior machines.”

There was no answering that.

“It’s hot,” she said. “I smell.”

There was no answering that either. The music played, through the crackling night air, and they listened, preoccupied and silent. He unhooked her bra, and she pushed herself up so he could get it free of her. He rubbed his finger across the welt it had made on the skin of her back.