The Third Reich Page 27

  “Next turn,” whispers El Quemado, burning like a torch swollen with veins.

  “Will I lose in the next turn?”

  “Deep down, very deep down, I love you,” says Frau Else. “This is the coldest winter of the war and nothing could possibly go worse. I’m in a deep hole that I may not be able to dig myself out of. Confidence is a poor counselor,” I hear myself say in a neutral voice.

  “Where are the photocopies?” asks El Quemado.

  “Frau Else gave them to your coach,” I answer, knowing that El Quemado has no coach or anything of the kind. The closest thing might be me, since I taught him to play! But not even.

  “I don’t have a coach,” says El Quemado, predictably.

  In the afternoon, before the match, I lay down in bed, exhausted, and dreamed that I was a detective (Florian Linden?) who, following a clue, made my way into a temple like the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. What was I doing there? I don’t know. All I know is that I went up and down corridors and through halls with no sense of foreboding, almost with pleasure, and that the coldness inside reminded me of the cold weather of childhood and an imaginary winter when everything, though only for an instant, was white and infinitely still. In the middle of the temple, which must have been built into the hill that looms over the town, I found a man, lit by a cone of light, who was playing chess. Though no one told me who it was, I knew it was Atahualpa. When I approached, peering over the player’s shoulder, I saw that the black pieces were charred. What had happened? The Indian chief turned to study me without much interest and said that someone had thrown the black pieces into the fire. Why? For spite? Instead of answering, Atahualpa moved the white queen to a square within reach of the black pieces. She’ll be taken! I thought. Then I told myself that it didn’t matter since Atahualpa was playing himself. In the next move the white queen was eliminated by a bishop. What’s the point of playing yourself if you’re going to cheat? I asked. This time the Indian didn’t even turn around. Extending his arm, he pointed toward the back of the temple, a dark space suspended between the vaulted ceiling and the granite floor. I took a few steps, more or less in the direction he was pointing, and I saw a huge redbrick fireplace with cast-iron guards that still contained the embers of a fire that must have consumed hundreds of logs. Poking out here and there among the ashes were the twisted tips of different chess pieces. What was the meaning of this? My face burning with indignation and rage, I turned and challenged Atahualpa to play me. He didn’t bother to look up from the game board. When I examined him more carefully, I realized that he wasn’t as old as I had mistakenly thought at first; his gnarled fingers and the long dirty hair that fell over his face were misleading. Play me if you’re a man, I shouted, wanting to escape from the dream. Behind me I felt the presence of the fireplace as a living organism: cold-hot, alien to me and alien to the Indian lost in thought. Why destroy a beautiful work of craftsmanship? I asked. The Indian laughed, but the laugh caught in his throat. When the game was over, he got up and went over to the fireplace, carrying the board and pieces on a tray. I realized that he was going to feed the fire, and I decided that it would be wisest to watch and wait. From the embers, flames sprang up again, swift tongues of fire that soon vanished, scarcely sated by such a meager offering. Atahualpa’s eyes were now fixed on the temple vault. Who are you? he asked. From my mouth came an outlandish answer: I’m Florian Linden and I’m looking for the murderer of Karl Schneider, otherwise known as Charly, a tourist here. The Indian gave me a scornful look and returned to the central circle of light, where, as if by magic, another board and more pieces were waiting for him. He grunted something unintelligible; I begged him to repeat it: That man was killed by the sea, by his own kindness and stupidity, the curt words in Spanish echoing offthe walls of the cave. I understood that the dream wasn’t making sense anymore or that it was coming to an end, and I hurried to ask a last few questions. Were the chess pieces offerings to a god? Why was he playing alone? When would it all be over? (I still don’t know what I meant by this.) Who else knew of the existence of the temple and how to get out of it? The Indian made his first play and sighed. Where do you think we are? he asked in turn. I confessed that I didn’t know for sure but I suspected that we were under the hill on which the town was built. You’re wrong, he said. Where are we? My voice was growing more and more hysterical. I was scared, I admit, and I wanted out. Atahualpa’s bright eyes observed me through the hair that fell over his face like a cascade of stagnant water. Haven’t you realized? How did you get here? I don’t know, I said, I was walking along the beach . . . Atahualpa laughed: we’re under the pedal boats, he said. With luck El Quemado will gradually rent them out—though, considering the weather, it’s hard to say for sure—and you’ll be able to leave. My last memory is of me hurling myself at the Indian, yelling . . . I woke up just in time to go down to let in El Quemado but not in time to shower. My groin and inner thighs burned. In Poland and on the Western front I made two grave mistakes. In the Mediterranean, El Quemado has wiped out the few army corps left behind as a diversion in western Libya and Tunisia. In the next turn I’ll lose Italy. And by the summer of ’44 I’ll probably have lost the game. Then what will happen?

  SEPTEMBER 22

  This afternoon—or this morning, I can’t say for sure, whenever it was that I got up for breakfast!—I ran into Frau Else, her husband, and a man I had never seen before sitting at a table offto one side in the restaurant, having tea and cakes. The stranger, tall, with blond hair and a deep tan, was the one leading the conversation, and every so often Frau Else and her husband laughed at his jokes or witticisms, leaning in toward each other until their heads touched and waving their hands as if in a plea to stop the avalanche of stories. After considering whether it was a good idea to join the group, I perched on a stool at the bar and ordered coffee. For once, the waiter hurried to bring it, which only backfired: the coffee spilled, the milk was too hot. As I was waiting I buried my face in my hands and tried to escape the nightmare. It didn’t work, so as soon as I had paid I hurried back up to my room.

  I slept for a while, and when I woke up I felt dizzy and sick to my stomach. I asked to have a call put through to Stuttgart. I needed to talk to someone, and who better than Conrad? Little by little I felt calmer, but no one picked up the phone at Conrad’s house. I ended the call and paced around the room, glancing at the German line of defense every time I passed the table, going out on the balcony, pounding or rather slapping at the walls and the doors, fighting the octopus of nerves that squirmed in my stomach.

  A little while later the phone rang. It was a call from downstairs, announcing a visitor. I said I didn’t want to see anyone, but the clerk insisted. My visitor refused to leave without seeing me. It was Alfons. Alfons who? I was given a last name that meant nothing to me. I could hear voices arguing. The designer I had gotten drunk with! I gave strict instructions that I didn’t want to see him, that they shouldn’t let him up. Through the receiver I could now hear with utter clarity the voice of my visitor protesting the rudeness, the lack of manners, the inhospitality, etc. I hung up.

  A minute or two later some agonized howls in the street drew me out onto the balcony. In the middle of the Paseo the designer was yelling up at the front of the hotel, shouting himself hoarse. The poor kid, I decided, was shortsighted and couldn’t see me. It took me a while to realize that he was just saying “asshole,” over and over. His hair was matted and he was wearing a mustardcolored blazer with huge shoulder pads. For an instant I was afraid he would be hit by a car, but luckily the Paseo Marítimo was almost deserted at that hour.

  Unnerved, I went back to bed, but I couldn’t sleep anymore. The insults had ceased a while ago, but the mysterious and hurtful words still echoed in my head. I asked myself who the long-winded stranger spotted with Frau Else could be. Her lover? A friend of the family? The doctor? No, doctors are quieter, more reserved. I asked myself whether Conrad had seen Ingeborg again. I imagined them holding hand
s and strolling down an autumn street. If only Conrad were less shy! The scene, full of possibilities as I saw it, brought tears of pain and happiness to my eyes. How I loved both of them, in my innermost being.

  As I lay there thinking, I suddenly realized that the hotel was sunk in a wintry silence. I got nervous and began to pace the room again. With no hope of getting things straight, I studied the strategic situation: at best I could hold out for three turns or, with great luck, four. I coughed, I talked out loud, I searched through my notebooks for a postcard that I then wrote while listening to the sound of the pen as it moved across the stiffsurface. I recited these lines by Goethe:

  And until you have possessed

  dying and rebirth,

  you are but a sullen guest

  on the gloomy earth.

  [Und so lang du das nicht hast,

  Dieses: Stirb und werde!

  Bist du nu rein trüber Gast

  Auf der dunklen Erde.]

  All for nothing. I tried to assuage the loneliness, the sense of forlornness, by calling Conrad, Ingeborg, Franz Grabowski, but no one answered. For a moment I wondered whether there was a single soul left in Stuttgart. I began to make random calls, flipping through my address book. It was fate that led me to dial the number of Mathias Müller, the pompous kid from Forced Marches, one of my sworn enemies. He was in. The surprise, I suppose, was mutual.

  Müller’s voice, phonily masculine, obeys his intent to show no emotion. Coldly, then, he welcomes me home. Naturally, he thinks I’ve returned. Naturally, too, he expects that I have some professional reason for calling, that perhaps I want to invite him to work together to prepare our Paris lectures. I disabuse him of this notion. I’m still in Spain. I heard something of the kind, he lies. Immediately he turns defensive, as if calling from Spain in itself constituted a trap or an insult. I’m just calling you at random, I said. Silence. I’m in my room making calls at random, and you’re the lucky winner. I burst out laughing and Müller tried in vain to imitate me. All he managed was a kind of squawk.

  “I’m the lucky winner,” he repeated.

  “That’s right. It could have been any other citizen of Stuttgart, but it was you.”

  “It was me. So did you get the numbers from a phone book or your address book?”

  “My address book.”

  “Then I wasn’t so lucky.”

  Suddenly Müller’s voice changed markedly. It was as if I were talking to a ten-year-old boy trying out bizarre ideas for size. Yesterday I saw Conrad, he said, at the club; he’s changed a lot, did you know? Conrad? How could I know when I’ve been in Spain for ages? This summer it looks like someone snagged him at last. Snagged him? Yes, dropped him, roped him, brought him down, took him out, put a bullet in him. He’s in love, he concluded. Conrad in love? On the other end of the line there was an affirmative “uh-huh” and then the two of us retreated into an embarrassing silence as we realized that we’d said too much. At last, Müller said: The Elephant is dead. Who the hell is the Elephant? My dog, he said, and then he burst into a torrent of onomatopoeic sounds: oink oink oink. That was a pig! Did his dog bark like a pig? See you later, I said hurriedly, and I hung up.

  When it got dark I called the reception desk asking for Clarita. The clerk said she wasn’t there. I thought I caught a hint of disgust in her reply. To whom am I speaking? The suspicion that it was Frau Else disguising her voice again lodged in my breast like a horror movie with swimming pools full of blood. This is Nuria, the receptionist, said the voice. How are you, Nuria? I asked in German. Fine, thank you, and you? she answered, also in German. Fine, fine, very well. It wasn’t Frau Else. Convulsing with happiness, I rolled to the edge of the bed and fell off, hurting myself. With my face buried in the rug, I let out all the tears that had built up over the course of the afternoon. Then I showered, shaved, and kept waiting.

  Spring 1944. I lose Spain and Portugal, Italy (except for Trieste), the last bridgehead on the western side of the Rhine, Hungary, Königsberg, Danzig, Kraków, Breslau, Poznan, Lodz (east of the Oder, only Kolberg still stands), Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ragusa (in Yugoslavia, only Zagreb still stands), four armored corps, ten infantry corps, fourteen air factors . . .

  SEPTEMBER 23

  I’m woken by a noise from the street. When I sit up in bed I can’t hear anything. And yet the feeling of having been called is strong and ineffable. I go out to the balcony in my undershorts: the sun isn’t up yet or maybe it has set already, and parked in front of the hotel is an ambulance with all its lights on. Between the back of the ambulance and the stairs, three people are speaking in soft voices, though they gesture emphatically. Their voices reach the balconies reduced to an unintelligible murmur. The horizon glows dark blue with phosphorescent streaks, like the prelude to a storm. The Paseo Marítimo is empty except for a shadow that vanishes along the boardwalk toward the tourist district, which at this time of day (but what time of day is it?) resembles a milky gray cupola, a bulge in the curve of the beach. At the other end, the lights of the port have faded or simply gone out. The asphalt of the Paseo is wet, a clear sign that it has rained. Suddenly an order rouses the men who are waiting. The doors to the hotel and the ambulance open simultaneously and a stretcher comes down the stairs carried by a couple of medics. With them, lagging solicitously a few steps behind, near the head of the prone figure, come Frau Else dressed in a long red coat and the big talker with the heavy tan, followed by the receptionist, the night watchman, a waiter, the fat lady from the kitchen. On the stretcher, a blanket pulled up to his chin, is Frau Else’s husband. The way they come down the stairs is extremely cautious, or so it seems to me. Everyone is watching the sick man. Lying on his back and looking desolate, he murmurs instructions for going down the stairs. No one pays any attention to him. Just then our gazes meet in the transparent (and shuddering) space between the balcony and the street.

  Like this:

  Then the doors close, the ambulance sets off with its siren blaring, though there isn’t a single car to be seen on the Paseo, the light coming through the ground-floor windows goes out, silence descends once again on the Del Mar.

  Summer 1944. Like Krebs, Freytag-Loringhoven, Gerhard Boldt, I record the stages of war despite knowing that it is lost. The storm has broken and now the rain is beating down on the open balcony like a long and bony hand, strangely maternal, as if trying to warn me of the hazards of hubris. There’s no one keeping watch over the doors to the hotel, so El Quemado had no problem coming up to my room on his own. The sea is rising. It whispers inside the bathroom where I’ve brought El Quemado to towel offhis hair. It’s the perfect moment to hit him, but I don’t move a muscle. El Quemado’s head, wrapped in the towel, exerts a cold and bright fascination over me. Under his feet a little puddle of water forms. Before we start playing I make him take off his wet T-shirt and put on one of mine. It’s a bit tight on him but at least it’s dry. As if at this point it were only natural for me to give him something, El Quemado puts it on without a word. It’s the end of summer and the end of the game. The Oder front and the Rhine front collapse at the first onslaught. El Quemado moves around the table as if he’s dancing. Which may be the case. My final circle of defense is Berlin–Stettin–Bremen– Berlin; everything else, including my armies in Bavaria and the north of Italy, is cut offfrom supply lines. Where will you sleep tonight, Quemado? I ask. At my place, answers El Quemado. The other questions, of which there are many, stick in my throat. After we parted, I went out on the balcony and stared into the rainy night. Big enough to swallow us all up. Tomorrow there is no doubt I’ll be defeated.

  SEPTEMBER 24

  I woke up late and with no appetite. Which is all for the best because I don’t have much money left. The rain hasn’t let up. When I ask for Frau Else at the reception desk, I’m told that she’s in Barcelona or Gerona, “at the Grand Hospital,” with her husband. The verdict on his health is unequivocal: he’s dying. My breakfast consisted of coffee and a croissant. At the restaurant only one waiter
was left to wait on five elderly Surinamese and me. All of a sudden the Del Mar is empty.

  In midafternoon, sitting on the balcony, I realized that my watch wasn’t working anymore. I tried to wind it, I tapped at it, but nothing helped. How long has it been broken? Is this a sign? I hope so. Through the balcony railing I watched the few passersby who hurry along the Paseo Marítimo. Walking toward the port, I spotted the Wolf and the Lamb, in identical denim jackets. I raised a hand to wave, but of course they didn’t see me. They looked like two puppies, jumping puddles, pushing each other and laughing.

  A little while later I went down to the dining room. There once again were the elderly Surinamese, sitting around a big paella pot heaped with yellow rice and seafood. I took a seat at a table nearby and ordered a hamburger and a glass of water. The Surinamese were talking very fast, whether in Dutch or their native tongue I couldn’t say, and the hum of their voices managed to soothe me for an instant. When the waiter appeared with the hamburger, I asked whether they were the only people left at the hotel. No, there are other guests who go on bus tours during the day. Retirees, he said. Retirees? How odd. And do they come in very late? Late and making a racket, said the waiter. After eating, I went back to my room, took a hot shower, and went to bed.

  I woke up in time to pack my suitcases and to ask that a collect call be put through to Germany. The novels I’d brought to read on the beach (and that I hadn’t even flipped through) I left on the night table for Frau Else to find when she got back. The only one I kept was the Florian Linden novel. After a while the receptionist came to inform me that I could talk now. Conrad had accepted the call. In a few brief words I told him that I was happy to talk to him and that with luck we would see each other soon. At first Conrad was a bit brusque and distant, but he soon realized the gravity of what was brewing. Is this our last good-bye? he asked in a rather affected way. I said no, though I was starting to sound less and less sure. Before we hung up we reminisced about our evenings at the club, the epic and unforgettable matches, and we had a good laugh when I told him about my phone conversation with Mathias Müller. Take good care of Ingeborg, I said by way of farewell. I will, Conrad promised solemnly.