The Third Reich Read online

  Until the last moment I thought she’d stay. No, that’s not true, I always knew that nothing could stop her. Her work and her independence come first, not to mention that after Hanna’s call all she could think about was leaving. So it wasn’t a happy farewell. And it surprised more than one person, Frau Else first among them, though maybe what surprised Frau Else was my decision to stay. To be perfectly honest, Ingeborg herself was the first to be surprised.

  What was the exact moment when I knew she would leave?

  Yesterday, as she was talking to Hanna, everything fell into place. Everything became clear and irrevocable. (But we didn’t discuss it at all.)

  This morning I paid her bill, hers alone, and carried down her suitcases. I didn’t want to make a scene or have it look as if she were running away. I was an idiot. I suppose the receptionist hurried off to give the news to Frau Else. It was still early when I ate lunch at the chapel. From the lookout point, the beach appeared to be deserted. Deserted compared to previous days, I mean. Again I ate rabbit stew and drank a bottle of Rioja. I think I didn’t want to go back to the hotel. The restaurant was almost empty, except for some businessmen who were celebrating something at two tables pushed together in the middle of the room. They were from Gerona and they were telling jokes in Catalan that their wives hardly bothered to acknowledge. As Conrad says: meetings are no place for girlfriends. The atmosphere was deadly; they all seemed as dazed as me. I took a nap in the car, at a cove near town that I thought I remembered from vacations with my parents. I woke up sweating and not the least bit drunk.

  In the afternoon I visited the manager of the Costa Brava, Mr. Pere, and assured him that he could find me at the Del Mar if he needed me for anything. We exchanged pleasantries and I left. Then I was at Navy Headquarters, where no one could give me any information about Charly. The woman I saw first didn’t even know what I was talking about. Luckily there was an official there who was familiar with the case and everything was cleared up. No news. Efforts were continuing. Patience. In the courtyard a small crowd gathered. A boy from the Red Cross of the Sea said they were the relatives of a new drowning victim. For a while I stayed there, sitting on the stairs, until I decided to go back to the hotel. I had a massive headache. At the Del Mar I searched in vain for Frau Else. No one could tell me where she was. The door to the hallway that leads to the laundry room was locked. I know there’s another way to get there, but I couldn’t find it.

  The room was a wreck: the bed was unmade and my clothes were scattered all over the floor. Several Third Reich counters had fallen too. It would’ve made the most sense if I had packed my bags and left. But I called down to the reception desk and asked them to tidy the room. Soon the girl I’d met before appeared, the same one who’d tried to find a table for me. A good omen. I sat down in a corner and told her to clean everything up. In a minute the room was neat and bright (easy enough to achieve the latter: all it required was opening the curtains). When she’d finished she gave me an angelic smile. Satisfied, I found one thousand pesetas for her. She’s a smart girl: the fallen counters were lined up beside the board. Not a single one was missing.

  The rest of the afternoon, until it got dark, I spent on the beach with El Quemado, talking about my games.

  SEPTEMBER 4

  I bought sandwiches at a bar called Lolita and beers at a supermarket. When El Quemado arrived I told him to sit beside the bed and I took a seat to the right of the table, with one hand resting in a relaxed fashion on the edge of the game board. I had a wideangle view: to one side El Quemado, with the bed and the bedside table (the Florian Linden book still on it!) behind him, and to the other side, to the left, the open balcony, the white chairs, the Paseo Marítimo, the beach, the pedal boat fortress. I planned to let him speak first, but words didn’t come easily to El Quemado, so I talked. I began by giving him a brief account of Ingeborg’s departure: the train trip, her job, full stop. I don’t know whether he was convinced. I went on to talk about the nature of the game, saying who knows how many stupid things, among them that the urge to play is simply a kind of song and that the players are singers performing an infinite range of compositions, dream compositions, deep-bore compositions, wish compositions, against the backdrop of a constantly shifting geography; decomposing food, that was what the maps and their constituent parts— the rules, the throws of the dice, the final victory or defeat—were like. Rotting food. I think that was when I brought out the sandwiches and beers, and as El Quemado began to eat I sprang over his legs and grabbed the Florian Linden book as if it were a treasure about to vanish into thin air. Among its pages I found no letter, no note, not the tiniest sign of hope. Just random words, police interrogations and confessions. Outside, night gradually crept over the beach and created the illusion of movement, of small dunes and fissures in the sand. Without moving from where he was, in a corner that grew darker and darker, El Quemado ate with the slowness of a ruminant, his lowered gaze fixed on the floor or on the tips of his huge fingers, emitting at regular intervals moans that were almost inaudible. I must confess that I experienced something like revulsion, a feeling of suffocation and heat. El Quemado’s moans each time he swallowed a mouthful of bread and cheese, or bread and ham, depending on which of the two sandwiches he was eating, constricted my chest until it felt as if it would burst. Overcome by weakness, I stepped over to the switch and turned on the light. Immediately I felt better, although there was still a hum in my temples, a hum that didn’t prevent me from picking up where I’d left off. Instead of sitting down again, I paced back and forth from the table to the bathroom door (I turned the bathroom light on too) and talked about the distribution of the army corps, about the dilemmas that two or more fronts could pose for the German player possessed of a limited number of forces, about the difficulties involved in transferring vast masses of infantry and armored units from west to east, from the north of Europe to the north of Africa, and about the common fate of average players: a fatal insufficiency of units to cover everything. These reflections caused El Quemado, with his mouth full, to pose a question that I didn’t bother to answer; I didn’t even understand it. I suppose I was carried away by my own momentum and inside I didn’t feel very well. So instead of responding I told him to come over to the map and take a look for himself. Meekly El Quemado approached and agreed that I was right: anyone could see that the black counters wouldn’t win. But wait! With my strategy, the situation changed. As an example, I described a match played in Stuttgart not long ago, although in my heart I gradually realized that this wasn’t what I wanted to say. What did I want to say? I don’t know. But it was important. Then: complete silence. El Quemado sat down next to the bed again, holding a little piece of sandwich between two fingers like an engagement ring, and I went out on the balcony walking as if in slow motion and I looked up at the stars and down at the tourists passing below. If only I hadn’t. Sitting on the edge of the Paseo Marítimo, the Wolf and the Lamb were watching my room. When they saw me they waved and shouted. Although at first I thought they were shouting insults, their cries were friendly. They wanted us to come down and have a drink with them (how they knew that El Quemado was there is a mystery to me) and beckoned more and more urgently; it wasn’t long before I saw passersby raising their eyes to search for the balcony that was the source of all the commotion. I had two options: either to retreat and close the balcony door without a word or to get rid of them with a promise that I had no intention of keeping. Both possibilities were unpleasant; red faced (a detail that the Wolf and the Lamb couldn’t see, considering the distance), I promised that I’d meet them in a while at the Andalusia Lodge. I stood on the balcony until they were lost from sight. In the room El Quemado was studying the counters deployed on the Eastern front. Engrossed, he seemed to understand how and why the units were deployed along particular lines, though obviously that was impossible. I dropped into a chair and said I was tired. El Quemado scarcely blinked. Then I asked why that pair of morons couldn’t leave me alone. What
do they want? To play? asked El Quemado. I noticed an attempt at clumsy irony on his lips. No, I answered, they want to go out drinking, have fun, anything that makes them feel less mummified.

  “A monotonous life, isn’t it?” he croaked.

  “Even worse, a monotonous holiday.”

  “Well, they’re not on holiday.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference, they live offof other people’s holidays, they attach themselves to other people’s holidays and leisure and make tourists’ lives miserable. They’re parasites.”

  El Quemado stared at me incredulously. Evidently the Wolf and the Lamb were his friends despite the apparent divide between them. In any case, I didn’t regret what I’d said. I remembered—or rather saw—Ingeborg’s face, fresh and rosy, and the certainty of happiness I felt when I was with her. All wrecked. The force of the injustice quickened my movements: I picked up tweezers and with the speed of a cashier counting out bills I placed the counters in the force pools, the units in the proper squares, and, trying not to sound dramatic, I invited him to play one or two turns, though my intention was to play a full game, through the Great Destruction. El Quemado hunched his shoulders and smiled several times, still undecided. This made him look almost uglier than I could bear, so as he considered his response I stared at a random point on the map, as is done in matches when the opponents are two players who have never met before, each avoiding the physical presence of the other until the first turn begins. When I looked up I met El Quemado’s innocent eyes, and I could see that he accepted. We pulled our chairs over to the table and deployed our forces. The armies of Poland, France, and the USSR were left with an unpropitious opening gambit, though it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, considering that El Quemado was such a beginner. The English Army, meanwhile, occupied decent positions, its fleet evenly distributed—with support in the Mediterranean from the French fleet—and the few army corps covering hexes of strategic importance. El Quemado turned out to be a fast learner. The global situation on the map to some degree resembled the historic situation, which doesn’t often happen when it’s veterans playing each other. They would never deploy the Polish Army along the border, or the French Army on all the hexes of the Maginot Line, since it makes most sense for the Poles to defend Warsaw in a ring, and for the French to cover just one hex of the Maginot Line. I took the first turn, explaining as I went, so that El Quemado was able to understand and appreciate the elegance with which my armored units broke through the Polish defenses (air superiority and mechanized exploitation), the massing of forces on the border with France, Belgium, and Holland, Italy’s declaration of war, and the advance (toward Tunis!) of the bulk of the troops stationed in Libya (the conventional wisdom is that Italy should enter the war no sooner than the winter of ’39, or if possible the spring of ’40, a strategy to which I obviously don’t subscribe), the entry of two German armored corps into Genoa, the trampoline hex (Essen) where I based my paratrooper corps, etc., all this with a minimal expenditure of BRP. El Quemado’s response could only be tentative: on the Eastern front he invaded the Baltic states and the adjoining section of Poland, but he forgot to occupy Bessarabia; on the Western front he opted for the Attrition Option and disembarked the British Expeditionary Force (two infantry corps) in France; in the Mediterranean he sent reinforcements to Tunis and Bizerte. I still had the initiative. In the Winter ’39 turn I launched an all-out attack in the West; I conquered Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark; through the south of France I reached Marseilles, and through the north I reached Sedan and Hex N24. I restructured my Army Group East. I disembarked an armored corps in Tripoli during the SR. The Option in the Mediterranean was Attrition and I got no results, but the threat is now tangible: Tunis and Bizerte are under siege and the First Italian Expeditionary Corps has penetrated Algeria, which was completely undefended. On the border with Egypt, the forces are balanced. The problem for the Allies lies in knowing exactly where to throw their weight. El Quemado’s response can’t be as vigorous as the situation requires; on the Western front and in the Mediterranean he chooses the Attrition Option and he throws everything he can into the attack, but he’s playing with short stacks and, to make things worse, the dice don’t go his way. In the East he occupies Bessarabia and stakes out a line from the Romanian border to East Prussia. The next turn will be decisive, but by now it’s late and we have to put it off. We leave the hotel. At the Andalusia Lodge we run into the Wolf and the Lamb with three Dutch girls. The girls seem thrilled to meet me and they’re amazed that I’m German. At first I thought they were pulling my leg; in fact, they were surprised that a German would have anything to do with such eccentric characters. At three in the morning I returned to the Del Mar feeling content for the first time in days. Could it be that I was convinced at last that it hadn’t been pointless to stay? Maybe. At some point during the night, from the depths of his defeat (were we discussing my Offensive in the West?), El Quemado asked how long I planned to stay in Spain. I sensed fear in his voice.

  “Until Charly’s body turns up,” I said.

  SEPTEMBER 5

  After breakfast I headed to the Costa Brava. The manager was at the reception desk. When he saw me he finished up a few things and motioned for me to follow him into his office. I don’t know how he knew that Ingeborg had left, but he did. With a few rather inappropriate insinuations, he made it clear that he understood my situation. Then, without giving me a chance to respond, he proceeded to sum up the current state of the search: no progress, many of the searchers had given up, and the operations, if one could dignify with such a name the efforts of one or two police Zodiacs, seemed headed for bureaucratic deadlock. I told him I planned to demand a personal report from Navy Headquarters and if necessary I was prepared to twist the requisite arms. Mr. Pere shook his head paternally. Not necessary; there was no need to get all worked up. As far as the paperwork was concerned, the German consulate had taken care of everything. Really, I was free to leave whenever I liked. Of course, they understood that Charly was my friend, the bonds of friendship, it goes without saying, but . . . Even the Spanish police, usually so skeptical, were about to close the case. All that remained was for the body to appear. Mr. Pere seemed much more relaxed than he had during our previous encounter. Now, somehow, he saw the case as if he and I were the sole, dutiful mourners of an inexplicable but natural death. (So is death always natural? Is it always a part of the essential order of things? Even if it involves windsurfing?) I’m sure it was an accident, he said, the kind we see every summer. I hinted at the possibility of suicide, but Mr. Pere shook his head and smiled. He’d been in the hotel business all his life and he thought he knew the souls of tourists; Charly, poor bastard, wasn’t the suicidal type. In any case, when you really thought about it, it was always a bitter paradox to die on vacation. Mr. Pere had been witness to many similar cases in his long career: old women who suffered heart attacks in August, children who drowned in the pool under everyone’s eyes, families wiped out on the highway (in the middle of their holidays!) . . . Such is life, he concluded, I’m sure your friend never imagined that he would die far from his homeland. Death and Homeland, he whispered, two tragedies. At eleven in the morning, there was something crepuscular about Mr. Pere. Here’s a happy man, I said to myself. It was pleasant to be there, talking to him, while at the reception desk tourists argued with the receptionist, and their voices, inoffensive and remote from matters of real concern, filtered into the office. As we talked I saw myself sitting comfortably there at the hotel, and I saw Mr. Pere and the people in the corridors and rooms, faces that were attracted to each other or pretended to be attracted to each other in the midst of empty or tense exchanges, couples sunbathing with linked hands, single men who worked alone, and friendly men who worked with others, all happy, or if not, at least at peace with themselves. Unfulfilled! But still convinced they were at the center of the universe. What did it matter whether Charly was alive or not, whether I was alive or not? Everything would roll on, dow
nhill, toward each individual death. Everyone was the center of the universe! The bunch of morons! Nothing was beyond their sway! Even in their sleep they controlled everything! With their indifference! Then I thought about El Quemado. He was outside. I saw him as if from underwater: the enemy.

  I tried to spend the rest of the day being productive, but it was impossible. I was incapable of putting on my bathing suit and going down to the beach, so I settled at the hotel bar to write postcards. I planned to send one to my parents, but in the end I wrote only to Conrad. I spent a long time sitting there just watching the tourists and the waiters making the rounds carrying trays loaded with drinks. I don’t know why, but I had the thought that this would be one of the last hot days. Who cared? For the sake of doing something, I had a salad and tomato juice. I think the food made me sick, because I started to sweat and feel queasy, so I went up to the room and took a cold shower. Then I went out again, this time without the car, heading toward Navy Headquarters, but when I got there I decided it wasn’t worth enduring another string of excuses and I walked on.