Shalimar the Clown (21 page)

Anya Ophuls drew herself up in a rare show of disunity. “It’s my answer also, Maximilian,” she corrected her husband mildly. “I think this slipped your mind a moment.” Max senior frowned. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Her answer as well, I know her answer as well as I know my own, and my mind, excuse me, nothing slips it. My mind, excuse me, is a fist of steel.” Max junior thought it was time to press a little. “And what is that answer?” he asked as delicately as possible, and his father with a loud short laugh forgot his irritation and smacked his palms together as hard as he could. “I discover that I am a stubborn bastard!” he cried, coughing hard. “I discover bloody-mindedness in myself, and mulishness to boot. I will not be chased from my home and my business! I will not go to Sauerwein’s and be made to look at his trembling old man’s paintings and eat quenelles of pike. I will stay in my house and run my factory and face the enemy down. Who do they think they are dealing with here? Some common inky-fingered ragamuffin from the streets? Maybe I’m on my last legs, young fellow, but I stand for something in this town.” His wife tugged at the sleeve of his coat. “Oh, yes,” he added, sinking faintly back into his seat and dabbing a napkin at his brow. “And your mother. She’s a stubborn bastard too.” Then came a series of coughs and expectorations into a silk kerchief that declared the subject closed.

“In that case, I won’t raise this with you again,” said Max junior, admitting defeat. “On one condition. If the day arrives when I have to come to you and say, today it’s time to run, on that day I want you to run without any argument, knowing that I will never say such a thing to you unless it is the simple truth.” His mother beamed with unqualified pride. “See how he drives a hard bargain, Maximilian, isn’t that so,” she cried. “He leaves us no honorable choice except to agree.”

Professor Max Ophuls informed vice-chancellor Danjon that family responsibilities obliged him to remain in Strasbourg. “What a waste,” Danjon replied. “If you should choose to stay alive before they kill you, come and see us. Although it is possible that we will not be spared, either. I fear that this will be an L=0 eclipse.” In the 1920s André Danjon had devised a scale of luminosity, the so-called Danjon scale, to describe the relative darkness of the moon during a lunar eclipse. L=0 meant total blackness, a complete absence of the reflected earthshine that could give the eclipsed moon a residual color ranging from a deep grey to a bright copper-red or even orange. “If I’m right,” Danjon told Max, “you and I are simply choosing to die in different towns during the general blackout.”

From that day forward each of the three Ophulses kept a small bag packed in a closet, but otherwise went about their work. In the absence of domestic help, most of the Belle Époque mansion was dust-sheeted and closed up. They ate meals together in the kitchen, moved extra desks into Max senior’s library to construct a three-person office, kept their own bedrooms clean and dusted, and maintained one small living room in which to receive their dwindling list of guests. As for Art & Aventure, two of the famous firm’s three Strasbourg presses were closed down at once. The third, on the quai Mullenheim, a smaller art-book facility—both letterpress and photogravure—where for many generations volumes dedicated to the finest artists in Europe had been produced to the highest standards in the world, was the scene of the Ophulses’ last stand. At first all three of them went in every day and manned the machines. However, contracts were being canceled constantly, so that soon enough the parents were obliged angrily to “retire,” and Max junior went to the print shop alone. Every call from a grand publisher from the capital deepened Max’s scorn for the weakness of Paris. He remembered his mother shouting into the telephone, “What do you mean, this is no time for art? If not now, when?”—and then staring fire-eyed at the silent receiver in her hand as if it were a traitor. “He hangs up,” she said to the room at large. “After twenty years’ business, without so much as good-bye.” The death of courtesy appeared to distress her more than the collapse of the family business. Her coughing husband moved at once to comfort her. “Take a look on the shelves,” he said. “You see that army of volumes? That army will outlast whatever iron men come clanking across our lives.”

When Max junior, hiding behind a burned-out truck just over a year later, saw the treasures of Art & Aventure’s backlist being tossed onto a bonfire outside the burning synagogue, his father’s words came back to him. If he had been able to discuss the burning books with Max senior the old man would probably have shrugged and quoted Bulgakov.
Manuscripts don’t burn.
Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t, thought orphaned Max in the incandescent night; but people, of course, will blaze away nicely, given a decent chance.

Strasbourg had become a ghost town, its streets ragged with absences. It was still charming, naturally, with its medieval half-timberings, its covered bridges, its pleasing aspects and riverside parks. As he prowled the largely deserted alleys of the Petite France district, the future Ambassador Ophuls told himself, “It’s as if everyone went away for August, and any day now it will be time for
la rentrée
and the place will be bustling again.” But in order to believe that one had to ignore the broken windows, the evidence of looting, the feral dogs in the streets, many of them abandoned pets driven insane by abandonment. One had to ignore the ruination of one’s own life. There were traditional, time-honored ways of doing this, and during the course of that year in which his family lost everything Max Ophuls did not ignore tradition. He frequented the few brothels and drinking dives that were still in business; they welcomed him in, glad of the trade, and offered him their best goods at bargain prices. The melancholy strain that had been lying dormant in his personality revealed itself in those months, inducing periods of Churchillian depression during which he considered ending his life more than once, and was only prevented from doing so by the knowledge that he would profoundly disgust his parents. As the year 1940 moved forward, a year in which all the news was bad, he walked the city streets and squares, alleys and embankments at high speed, hour after hour, with his head down, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of a double-breasted serge greatcoat, and a dark blue beret pulled low over his frowning brow. If he moved fast enough, like an American comic-book superhero, like the Flash, like a Jewish Superman, maybe he could create the illusion that the people of Strasbourg were still there. If he moved fast enough maybe he could save the world. If he moved fast enough maybe he could break through into another universe in which everything wasn’t so full of shit. If he moved fast enough maybe he could outpace his own anger and fear. If he moved fast enough maybe he could stop feeling like a helpless fool.

These thoughts were interrupted one May afternoon by a violent collision. As usual, he hadn’t been looking where he was going, and on this occasion there was someone in the way, a surprisingly small woman, so small that at first he thought he had knocked over a child. A parcel wrapped in string and brown paper dropped from the small woman’s hands as she fell, and the brown paper tore. Her companion, a big shambling fellow as oversized as she was tiny, helped her to her feet and hurriedly retrieved the torn parcel, carefully taking off his own raincoat and wrapping the parcel in it. He also picked up and dusted off his companion’s fallen hat, with its single upright feather, placing it carefully, even lovingly, back on her head of marcelled black hair. The fallen woman had not cried out, nor did the big man seek to remonstrate with Ophuls for his clumsiness. They simply gathered themselves together and moved on. It was as if they were phantoms, ill-assorted phantoms surprised that they still possessed solidity, mass, volume, that people were still able to collide with them and knock them down, rather than passing through their bodies with nothing more than a small icy shudder of subconscious recognition.

When they had taken a dozen steps away, however, they stopped and looked back over their shoulders without turning their bodies. They saw Max staring after them and were covered in a kind of spectral embarrassment. Ghosts were probably always surprised to be seen, Max supposed. The woman was nodding furiously and the man, slowly, as if in a dream, turned and walked back toward Max. He’s going to hit me after all, Max thought, and wondered whether he should take to his heels. Then the man reached him and spoke, carefully, in a low voice: “You are the printer?” With those four words he gave Max Ophuls back a sense of purpose in life.

You are the printer.
Even before the fall of the Maginot Line, the first stirrings of what would become the Resistance were making themselves felt. The couple with the brown paper parcel, whom he would only know by the work-names of “Bill” and “Blandine,” were his first links to that world. Their group would later start calling itself the Seventh Column of Alsace, but for the moment it was just Bill and Blandine and a few like-minded associates, doing what they could to prepare for the coming unpleasantness. Yes, he was the printer, Max affirmed. Yes, he was a Jew. Yes, he would help. “Time is short,” Bill said. “Escape routes are being built. Identity documents must be printed. However many possible. The need is very great. Your parents included. You included also.” Max looked at the parcel. “These are adequate,” Bill said, grimacing. “But not guaranteed to pass. Work of a higher standard is required.” Bill’s manner was always courteous and deferential. Blandine was the sharp-tongued one of the pair. “Do you actually know how to do what we need,” she asked Max that first time, looking unblinking into his eyes, “or are you just a pampered milord who underpays his workers and spends the money on whores?”

Her enormous lover looked discomfited and shifted his feet. “But no, my dearest, be good, the gentleman is going to be of assistance. Please excuse her, sir,” he said to Max. “The communism burns hot in her, the class war and autonomy and such.” Ever since Gouraud’s Fourth Army brought Strasbourg back under French control in November 1918, the local communists had favored the autonomy of Alsace from both France and Germany, whereas socialists had favored a rapid assimilation with France. How obsolete both positions looked now, how pathetic the passions they had so recently aroused. Max glared back at Blandine. “Yes,” he told her, not knowing if he was telling the truth, suddenly determined to prove himself unworthy of her scorn. “I can print any damn thing you want me to.” She spat into a gutter. “Good,” she said. “Then there’s work to be done.”

If he moved fast enough maybe he could break through into another universe.
He had been granted his wish. Julien Levy had been right. Max turned out to have a real gift for forgery, the painstaking miniaturist zeal of a monk illuminating a Bible, that enabled him to create plausible counterfeits of whatever was required and make good his boast. When the materials provided by Bill and Blandine were inadequate—when the paper had the wrong sort of coarseness or the ink was fractionally the wrong color—he scavenged and scrounged tirelessly until he came up with the goods. On one occasion he actually broke into a deserted art-supplies store and took what he needed, promising himself that if liberation ever came he would return and repay the owner, a promise that, as he recorded in his book of wartime memoirs, he faithfully kept. As he forged and printed the documents—one by one, at snail’s pace, always by night, alone in the pressroom, with the shutters locked, and by the light of no more than a single small lantern—he felt he was also forging a new self, one that resisted, that pushed back against fate, rejecting inevitability, choosing to remake the world.

Often, as he labored, he had the sense of being the medium, not the creator: the sense of a higher power working through him. He had never been a religious man, and tried to rationalize this feeling away; yet it stubbornly persisted. A purpose was working itself out through him. He could not give it a name, but its boundaries were far greater than his own. When he had contact with Bill or Blandine and handed over the identity cards and doctored passports he spoke in effusive, optimistic words about what they were doing. Bill was monosyllabic at best in responding to such torrents, until Max learned the lesson of his silences and did his best to restrain himself. Blandine was, as ever, cuttingly to the point. “Oh, shut up,” she said. “To listen to you, one would think we were on the verge of overthrowing the Third Reich, instead of just hoping to prick the beast’s behind here and there and maybe save a few wretched souls as well.”

It was four o’clock in the morning of the fifteenth of June, 1940. Paris had fallen. The French military command had believed that tanks could not pass through the heavily wooded hill country of the Ardennes and that the German advance could therefore be resisted at the immense Maginot Line defense system in Lorraine. This was a mistake. Along the Line there was a well-dug-in force, also an extensive underground system of tunnels, railways, hospitals, kitchens and communications centers. While they waited for the German assault the French soldiers whiled away their subterranean days by painting trompe-l’oeil murals on the tunnel walls—tropical landscapes, rooms with chintz wallpaper and open windows looking out onto bucolic spring scenery, heroic crests bearing such mottoes as
They shall not pass.
Unfortunately, they did not need to pass. Panzer divisions commanded by Rommel and others invaded through the supposedly impassable Ardennes and reached the villages of Dinant and Sedan on the Meuse on May 12. On June 13 the government of France abandoned the capital to the aggressor. Outflanked and irrelevant, the French forces at the Maginot Line surrendered a few weeks later. Four years after that the tide of history would have turned and the Normandy landings would begin, but those four years would be a century long.

“I have to go,” Blandine said, gathering up the papers Max had for her, without a word of thanks or of appreciation for the quality of the work. This was her way. But at the back door, as he let her out, she saw the first light of dawn slinking into the sky and trembled and leaned back against him. “The dawn before the darkness,” she said, and turned, and kissed him. They stumbled back through the door into the room of the printing presses and had sex against one of the big dark green machines, without getting undressed. He had to lift her up to enter her and for a moment her feet in their high heels dangled awkwardly. Then she swiftly wrapped her legs around his waist and squeezed. He saw that her height was a matter of sensitivity. To compensate for it she remained almost savagely composed at all times. Even during their congress the hat with the feather remained firmly planted on her head. Four days later the Nazi flag flew over the Cathedral and the darkness began.