The Rose Café (17 page)

Many who remained here for any length of time found themselves in this position. Perhaps the vista of the pointless little harbor and the town, which were diminished to insignificance by the wide empty sea to the north and the great stacked mountain ridges to the south, gave them perspective.

Late one night, a couple of weeks after his unmasking, I found Herr Komandante quite drunk, alone in the little nook beside the bar. He was singing old sentimental German songs to himself, swinging his glass and toasting people who passed within his view.

“Hey, Pretty Boy,” he called out in German when I walked by toward the kitchen. He lifted his glass to me and winked.

“
So gehts, nicht wahr? Es ist eine schöne Nacht für Liebe, nein
?”

“Sorry?” I said. “
Ich verstehe nicht
. I don't understand.”

I knew exactly what he was saying, though.

“
On fait ce qu'on peut, je disais. Nicht wahr
? What can one do? This is the life,” he said.

“I suppose,” I said.

“Make a favor, my friend, take a drink with me this night.”

I said I would try, and when I was finished with my chores, I poured myself a glass of cold muscat and sat down with him.

He began rambling on in his combination of broken French and English about the darkness back in Germany.

“You are smart young man, maybe? But you don't know Berlin in winter. Weeks on the end,” he said. “No sun is there. And so? The sadness.” He pretended to weep. “Trouble in the mind, ja?” He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “You seek pleasures elsewhere, you see. And then sometimes. Comes the darkness. Even here in Corsica in the light. Sometimes the … what you do you call them?” He swirled his hand above his head with a billowing motion.

“Clouds?” I said in English.

“Ja, ja, clouds.
Wolken
. They make you do things. Nicht wahr? Nobody understands the Wolken.”

I kept quiet and let him go on. I think Herr Komandante was about forty, which would have made him old enough to have been a soldier. I had always wondered where he was during the war, and I judged that he was drunk enough to talk, so at an opportune moment I asked him outright where he had been during the war years.

“You are knowing the
Hitler Jugend
, perhaps, the Hitler Youth,” he said without pause or shame. “Ja, well that was me. But for my part, I am hating Hitler, and not me alone either, you should know—other boys too. But what choice is there? You don't join, they think you are a Jew, so then they just kill you. We are all knowing this. Or in my case worse, maybe the Kaporal finds out that you are homosexual, so, you know …” He pressed his palms together in an attitude of prayer and lifted his eyes to the heavens. “You wear the pink badge and the people, they mock you and kick you. Some of those boys went to the camps with the Jews. Kaput. You never see
them
again. I knew fellows like that. A lot of painted boys I knew, did things for money out on the Kurfürstendamm. And do you know the Swings? They are a degenerate group, girls and boys alike, dancing to the American music, long hair, girls painting their nails and sleeping with the boys, all together there, changing bedrooms. Not me. I never wished to be like them, so it was off to the Hitler Jugend for me. Good place to hide. Plus a lot of boys. Sometimes, eh? We used to pleasure ourselves in big groups. The Hitler Youth, not quite so pure as the Führer believed.”

He winked.

When he was seventeen he was drafted. He went through a brief training and then was sent out to fight. He said he had no interest whatsoever in fighting; all he wanted to do was to survive. “I was not brave,” he confessed.

He lowered his voice at one point. He was sweating in the heat now, smoking sloppily and spilling ashes in his beer.

“Want to know a secret?” he said. “I am telling you something. In the war I am with some soldiers up in Normandy somewhere, we are in a ditch, planning ambush, ja? And along comes a big
troupeau
of the Americans. My gang, we see that we are too few in numbers to fight, and so they all slip back into the woods. Retreat. Not me. I am lying in the ditch, and when the American boys are just a few meters off, I throw out my rifle in the dust and raise my hands: ‘Mercy—please.' Of course they take me prisoner. But let me tell you something.” He leaned forward. “That's just what I wanted,” he whispered. “Not so bad.”

The Americans put him in a cellar in a building with a shattered upper floor, along with some other prisoners. They fed him and gave him dry bedding of straw and hay and kept the group there for a week. Then they herded them into trucks and took them to Le Havre, where he was loaded onto a troop ship.

“Twelve, maybe fourteen days we are on that ship. Rolling around. Some of us sick. And then the trains. We had windows, though. And what beauty we saw. The cities were filthy but then we roll on, a big winding river with a city on the right side of the train, pastures and fields, and fields and green with the horse and the cow, and then big squares of white fences, and then finally, we unload into trucks and come to a big farm with low new buildings, shining in the sun.”

They were housed in a newly constructed barracks that smelled of freshly cut pine, with clean latrines and narrow but comfortable cots with rough, clean-smelling sheets. Herr Komandante said that for the first time since the war began, he was comfortable. They ate well, the work was easy—they cut hay, milked cows twice a day, did a little ditching now and then—but they had full breakfasts and big suppers at night with sweating glass pitchers of iced tea and milk. They could write letters, they were supplied with cigarettes, and the guards were lazy. Nobody bothered them as long as they didn't try to run away.

“One day early on there, we are all called out to muster,” he said. “Was Sunday, and they have a big midday dinner, then afterward, the boss man, he comes out and gives big speech. We don't know what the hell he is saying, all is English and nobody can understand except one word—‘America.' But he is smiling and spreading his arms. And then we are going out into the barnyard, and there is this big barrel, you see. The guards, all laughing and slapping us on the back. Friendly. Some of us are thinking,
ach
—now it comes, now we are to be killed. But no! They bring out a bag of salt, then ice, then big cream from the dairy. Then sugar, a huge sugar amount. We never see so much sugar. There is a handle, you see, on the barrel, and we share the turning. Maybe half an hour, we turn that handle. Then the guards come with bowls and spoons and they open up the barrel and take out—you know what they take out? Ice cream. Vanilla ice cream! They take big bowls for themselves and go off, then show us—more spoons, more bowls, as much as we want. Everyone is so happy, some of us begin singing the old songs. Some soldiers there, they know harmonies. And the singing goes on into the night. The guards, they are laughing with us. They are just boys like us, you know, narrow-faced American farm boys with bad teeth and straw-colored hair.

“And so every Sunday afternoon it is like that. Ice cream making. Wonderful hot sun. Singing. Every Sunday, this boss with his speeches. ‘America,' he says again and again. We understand that but nothing else. But everybody there, they like that boss, they like this prison.”

He shook his head and began to laugh bitterly. “That is very funny, nicht wahr? We are all liking this prison.”

As far as I could make out, he was somewhere in the Midwest on a big state farm. He said there was a town nearby, and after a few months they were even allowed to go into town, under guard at first, then sometimes on their own. Where would they run to anyway? They didn't know where they were, and by that time not one of them had any loyalty to the Nazi doctrine. It was, Herr Komandante said, the finest place any German man of draft age could spend the war.

He was there for a year.

“Then there comes a sad day for us. Big news in the camp. We are free. War is over. So it's back to Berlin. Back onto the trains, back through the green fields to the dark city. Then the transport ship. There are some horses in that ship, in the hold, I think they are taking them over for food for the refugee camps. And those horses there, they are terrified, they are—what do you say—calling—to be free.” He attempted a drunken whinny, throwing back his head. People in the bar looked over. “You can hear them sometimes at night. You know what I am thinking? I am like those horses, I am thinking.”

It was late now. Out on the terrace, the card game was breaking up. Chairs were pushed back, Jacquis and André strolled off down the dark causeway toward the winking lights of the town, coats draped over their shoulders. Herr Komandante was slowing down, and finally stopped speaking altogether and just stared at the table in the same way that he had been staring at the bar when Jean-Pierre tried to convince him to stay.

“
Pferd in einer Stall
,” he muttered. “Horse in a cage. That's me.”

By the time Marie returned, Chrétien had established himself with Karen, the Barefoot Contessa. He rarely discussed with me the intimacies of their relationship, as he had about Marie, which made me think he was getting along quite well. I would see them walking out to the Ile de la Pietra in the afternoons, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of the Contessa's sister and their annoying young cousin. One afternoon Chrétien and the Contessa did not return until just before the dinner hour, and they were looking flushed and sunburned when they got back. I heard but tried not to listen to a serious, high-speed dressing-down Micheline delivered to Chrétien just before the dinners were served. She had had to set the tables herself and had enlisted me to help, even though I was still cleaning fish for the dinners.

Marie of course noticed all this, and had fallen into an informal détente with Chrétien in which the two of them were civil with each other, even allies of a sort. The fact is, Marie still needed him in her ongoing skirmish with her tutor.

I was headed out to the terrace to have a coffee with Chrétien late one morning, while Marie was trapped in her corner seat with Giancarlo. I saw her beckon Chrétien over silently. Like a loyal dog, he went over and sat down with them. Giancarlo innocently included him in his tedious lecture, and soon Marie excused herself to visit the bathroom. She fled through the back door of the kitchen and headed for the cove.

“Come for a swim,” she said to me as she passed.

She was far out on the other side of the cove when I got there, taking her time. I had my fruit basket and went out to collect a few urchins for the midday meal, and once I had a basketful, I joined her on her flat rock.

“So you heard about Herr Komandante,” I said.

“Of course. But they should send him back to Berlin. A dirty old German like that. He shouldn't be allowed here. Bothering young boys, it's dirty. He is a disgusting old man.”

Marie was not, I had noticed, the most liberal-minded Parisian I had ever met.

We lay there for a while not speaking, allowing the sun to bake us.

Sometimes from that quarter, looking out to the west, the only thing you could see was the rocky point of the islet with its Genoese watchtower, the blue-green line of the horizon of the ancient Mediterranean, a few passing gulls slipping suddenly over the high rock walls, and nothing more. Had you been somehow mysteriously dropped down into this environment, it would have been hard to identify exactly what era you were living in.

I had been thinking about a conversation I listened in on the day before with Giancarlo and Chrétien: an elaborate, convoluted argument having to do with Henri Bergson's concept of time and the idea that in the human mind, time operates as a continuous flow in which past and present are inseparable from memory and consciousness. Something in that cove, some ineffable sense of the place, the air, and the smell of salt and seaweed and sun on granite had the effect, I noticed, of lifting me out of the present. I was suspended. It seemed to justify Bergson's theory.

I looked over at Marie. She had stripped off her top and was lying on her stomach, with her head turned away, toward the islet, so quiet I thought she might be asleep. I turned over on my side, and telescoped my left hand so as to view the island across her bare back. Her sun-browned shoulder blades and the long sweep of her back, viewed from the proper perspective through my curled fingers, matched almost perfectly the prominence and the flat roll of rocky shoreline on the opposite side of the cove. Even the color was similar, a reddish brown.

“What are you doing there?” Marie murmured, without turning over.

“Oh, nothing,” I said in a nasal voice that sounded like Giancarlo's. “I was just thinking about Henri Bergson and how you can't really measure the elements of linear time.”

“
Oh mon Dieu que c'est ennuyeux tout ça
;
tu m'embêtes quelquefois; vous tous m'embêtez. C'est trop
!”

I laughed. “Sorry,” I said.

“Good.”

“I apologize.”

“OK.”

I looked at her for a second, and then without thinking, leaned over and kissed the back of her right shoulder.

“Oh hey, Cowboy, cut that out.”

“Sorry.”

She groaned in boredom. I think she was trying to sleep.

I was curious to know what Marie intended to do after this summer. She was so indifferent to her studies and didn't seem to have any interests or cares other than dancing and preening like a cat and staying warm. She hated cold. In the brave new world that was forming back in Paris among the students I knew, it was all politics, and Sturm und Drang, and existential angst. People sat in cafés in their black turtlenecks, smoking incessantly and taking on all the problems of the world at large. Marie was more like an American girl in some ways—hazel-eyed and suspended in an indifferent present.

“I forgot you were a Catholic,” I said.