La Place De L'Étoile

by Patrick Modiano

  I am skulking around the Berghof when I meet Eva for the first time. The instant attraction is mutual. Hitler comes to Obersalzberg once a month. We get along very well. He gracefully accepts my role as escort to Eva. Such things seem to him so futile . . . In the evenings, he tells us about his plans. We listen, like two children. He has given me the honorary title of SS Brigadenführer. I should dig out the photo on which Eva wrote ‘Für mein kleiner Jude, mein gelibter Schlemilovitch – Seine Eva.’

  Hilda gently lays a hand on my shoulder. It is late, the customers have left the café. The waiter is reading Der Stern by the bar. Hilda gets up and slips a coin into the jukebox. Instantly, the voice of Zarah Leander lulls me like a gentle, husky river. She sings ‘Ich stehe im Regen’ – ‘I am standing in the rain’. She sings ‘Mit roten Rosen fängt die Liebe meistens an’ – ‘Love always begins with red roses’. It often ends with Gillette Extra-Blue razor blades. The waiter asks us to leave the café. We walk along a desolate avenue. Where am I? Vienna? Geneva? Paris? And this woman clutching my arm, is she Tania, Loïtia, Hilda, Eva Braun? Later, we find ourselves standing in the middle of an esplanade in front of an illuminated basilica. The Sacré-Coeur? I slump onto the seat of a hydraulic lift. A door is opened. A vast white-walled bedroom. A four-poster bed. I fall asleep.

  The following day, I got to know Hilda, my new friend. Despite her dark hair and her delicate face, she was a little Aryan girl, half-German, half-Austrian. From her wallet, she took several photographs of her father and her mother. Both dead. The former in Berlin during the bombings, the latter disembowelled by Cossacks. I was sorry I had never known Herr Murzzuschlag, a stiff SS officer and perhaps my future father-in-law. I was much taken by their wedding photograph: Murzzuschlag and his young bride in Bruxelles, intriguing passers-by with his immaculate uniform and the contemptuous jut of his chin. This was not just anybody: a friend of Rudolph Hess and Goebbels, on first name terms with Himmler. Hitler himself, when awarding him the Cross of Merit, said ‘Skorzeny and Murzzuschlag never let me down.’

  Why had I not met Hilda in the thirties? Frau Murzzuschlag makes kneidel for me, her husband fondly pats my cheeks and says:

  ‘You’re a Jew? We’ll sort that out, my boy! Marry my daughter! I’ll take care of the rest! Der treue Heinrich* will understand.’

  I thank him, but I do not need his help: lover of Eva Braun, confidant of Hitler, I have long been the official Jew of the Third Reich. To the end, I spend my weekends in Obersalzberg and the Nazi bigwigs show me the utmost respect.

  Hilda’s bedroom was on the top floor of a grand old townhouse on Backerstraße. The room was remarkable for its spaciousness, its high ceilings, a four poster bed, a picture window. In the middle, a cage with a Jewish nightingale. In one corner, a wooden horse. Here and there, a number of kaleidoscopes. Each stamped ‘Schlemilovitch Ltd., New York’.

  ‘Probably a Jew,’ Hilda confided, ‘but he makes beautiful kaleidoscopes. I adore kaleidoscopes. Look in this one, Raphäel! A human face made up of a thousand brilliant facets constantly shifting . . .’

  I want to confess to her that my father was responsible for these miniature works of art, but she constantly kvetches to me about the Jews. They demand compensation on the pretext that their families were exterminated in the camps, they are bleeding Germany white. They drove around in Mercedes drinking champagne while the poor Germans were working to rebuild their country and living hand-to-mouth. Oh, the bastards! First they corrupted Germany, now they were pimping it.

  The Jews had won the war, had killed her father, raped her mother, her position was unshakeable. Better to wait a few days before showing her my family tree. Until then, I would be the epitome of Gallic charm: the Grey Musketeers, the insolence, the elegance, the made in Paris spirit. Had not Hilda complimented me on the mellifluent way I spoke French?

  ‘Never,’ she would say, ‘never have I heard a Frenchman speak his mother tongue as beautifully as you.’

  ‘I’m from Touraine,’ I explained. ‘We pride ourselves on speaking the purest French. My name is Raphäel de Château-Chinon, but don’t tell anyone. I swallowed my passport so I could remain incognito. One more thing: as a good Frenchman, I find Austrian food DIS-GUS-TING! When I think of the canards à l’orange, the nuits-saint-georges, the sauternes and the poularde de Bresse! Hilda, I will take you to France, knock some of the rough edges off you. Vive la France, Hilda! You people are savages!’

  She tried to make me forget Austro-German uncouthness, talking to me about Mozart, Schubert. Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

  ‘Hofmannsthal?’ I said, ‘A Jew, my little Hilda! Austria is a Jewish colony. Freud, Zweig, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, it’s a ghetto! I defy you to name me a great Tyrolean poet! In France, we don’t allow ourselves to be overrun like that. The likes of Montaigne and Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Céline have never succeeded in Jewifying our country. Ronsard and Du Bellay are there, keeping an eye open for any trouble! In fact, my little Hilda, we French make no distinction between Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians and all the other Jews. And don’t talk to me about your papa, SS Murzzuschlag, or the Nazis. All Jews, meine kleine Hilda, the Nazis are the shock troops of the Jews! Think about Hitler, the little runt of a corporal wandering the streets of Vienna, beaten, numb with cold, starving to death! Long live Hitler!’

  She listened to me, her eyes wide. Soon I would tell her more brutal truths. I would reveal my identity. I would choose the perfect moment and whisper into her ear the confession the nameless knight made to the Inquisitor’s daughter:

  Ich, Señora, eur Geliebter,

  Bin der Sohn des vielbelobten,

  Großen, schriftgelehrten Rabbi

  Israel von Saragossa.

  Hilda had obviously never read Heine’s poem.

  In the evenings, we would often go to the Prater. I love funfairs.

  ‘The thing is, Hilda,’ I explained, ‘funfairs are terribly sad. The “enchanted river”, for example, you get into a boat with your friends, you are carried along by the current and when you come to the end you get a bullet in the back of the head. Then there’s the House of Mirrors, the rollercoaster, the merry-go-rounds, the shooting galleries. You stand in front of the distorting mirrors and your emaciated face, your skeletal chest terrify you. The cars on the rollercoaster systematically derail and you break your back. The merry-go-rounds are surrounded by archers who shoot little poisoned darts into your spine. The merry-go-round never stops, victims fall from the wooden horses. From time to time, the machinery seizes up, clogged with piles of corpses and the archers clear the area for the newcomers. Passers-by are encouraged to stand in little groups inside the shooting galleries. The archers are told to aim between the eyes, but sometimes an arrow goes wide and hits an ear, an eye, a gaping mouth. When they hit their mark, the archers are awarded five points. When the arrow goes astray, five points are deducted. The archer with the highest score wins a young blonde Pomeranian girl, an ornament made of silver paper and a chocolate skull. I forgot to mention the lucky bags at the sweet stalls: every bag sold contains a few amethyst blue crystals of cyanide, with instructions for use: “Na, friss schon! ”* Bags of cyanide for everyone. Six million of them! We’re happy here in Theresienstadt . . .’

  Next to the Prater is a large park where lovers stroll; in the gathering dark I led Hilda under the leafy boughs, next to the banks of flowers, the blue-tinged lawns. I slapped her three times. It gave me pleasure to watch blood trickle from the corners of her mouth. Great pleasure. A German girl. Who once had loved an SS Totenkopf. I know how to bear an old grudge.

  Now, I let myself slip down the slope of confession. I look nothing like Gregory Peck as I claimed earlier. I have neither the energy nor the keep smiling spirit of the American. I look like my cousin, the Jewish painter Modigliani. They called him ‘The Tuscan Christ’. I forbid the use of this moniker to refer to my handsome tubercular face.

  But actually, no, I look no more like Modigliani than I do like Gregory
Peck. I’m the spitting image of Groucho Marx: the same eyes, the same nose, the same moustache. Worse still, I’m a dead ringer for Süss the Jew. Hilda had to notice at all costs. For a week now, she had not been firm enough with me.

  Lying around her room were recordings of the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ and the ‘Hitlerleute’ which she kept in memory of her father. The vultures of Stalingrad and the phosphorus of Hamburg will eat away at the vocal cords of these warriors. Everyone’s turn comes eventually. I bought two record-players. To compose my Judeo-Nazi Requiem, I simultaneously played the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ and the ‘Einheitsfrontlied’ of the International Brigades. Next I blended the ‘Hitlerleute’ with the anthem of the Thälmann-Kolonne, the last cry of Jews and German communists. And then, at the end of the Requiem, Wagner’s Götterdämmerung conjured Berlin in flames, the tragic destiny of the German people, while the litany for the dead of Auschwitz evoked the pounds into which six million dogs were hurled.

  H ilda does not work. I inquire about the source of her income. She explains that she sold some Biedermeier furniture belonging to a dead aunt for twenty thousand schillings. Barely a quarter of that sum is left.

  I tell her my concerns.

  ‘Don’t worry, Raphäel,’ she says.

  Every night she goes to the Blaue Bar at the Hotel Sacher. She seeks out the most well-heeled guests and sells them her charms. After three weeks, we have fifteen hundred dollars. Hilda develops a taste for the profession. It offers her a discipline and a stability she has not had until now.

  She artlessly makes the acquaintance of Yasmine. This young woman also haunts the Hotel Sacher offering her dark eyes, her bronzed skin, her oriental languor to Americans passing through.

  At first, they compare notes on their profession, and quickly become the best of friends. Yasmine moves in to Backerstraße, the four-poster bed is big enough for three.

  Of the two women in your harem, these two charming whores, Yasmine quickly became your favourite. She talks to you of Istanbul, where she was born, of the Galata Bridge, the Valide Mosque. You feel a sudden urge to reach the Bosphorus. In Vienna, winter is drawing in and you will not make it out alive. When the first snows began to fall, you clung more tightly to your Turkish friend. You left Vienna and visited cousins who manufactured playing cards in Trieste. From there, a brief detour to Budapest. No cousins left in Budapest. Exterminated. In Salonika, the birthplace of your family, you discovered the same desolation, the Jewish community of this city had been of particular interest to the Germans. In Istanbul, your cousins Sarah, Rachel, Dinah and Blanca celebrated the return of the prodigal son. You rediscovered your taste for life and for lokum. Already, your cousins in Cairo were waiting impatiently for you to visit. They asked for news of your exiled cousins in London, in Paris, in Caracas.

  You spent some time in Egypt. Since you did not have a penny to your name, you organised a funfair in Port Said with all your old friends as exhibits. For twenty dinars a head, passers-by could watch Hitler in a cage declaiming Hamlet’s soliloquy, Göring and Rudolph Hess on the trapeze, Himmler and his performing dogs, Goebbels the snake charmer, von Schirach the sword swallower, Julius Streicher the wandering Jew. Some distance away, the ‘Collabo’s Beauties’ were performing an improvised ‘Oriental’ revue: there was Robert Brasillach dressed as a sultan, Drieu la Rochelle as the bayadère, Albert Bonnard as the guardian of the seraglio, Bonny and Lafton the bloodthirsty viziers and the missionary Mayo de Lupé. The ‘Vichy Follies’ singers were performing an operetta extravaganza: among the troupe were a Maréchal, admirals Esteva, Bard and Platón, a few bishops, brigadier Darnand and the traitorous Prince Laval. Even so, the most visited stall in the fairground was the one where people stripped your former mistress Eva Braun. She was still a handsome woman. For a hundred dinars each, aficionados could find out for themselves.

  After a week, you abandoned your cherished ghosts and left with the takings. You crossed the Red Sea, reached Palestine and died of exhaustion. And there you were, you had made it all the way from Paris to Jerusalem.

  Between them, my two girlfriends earned three thousand schillings a night. Prostitution and pandering suddenly seemed to me to be ill-paid professions unless practised on the scale of a Lucky Luciano. Unfortunately, I was not cast from the same mould as that captain of industry.

  Yasmine introduced me to a number of dubious individuals: Jean-Farouk de Mérode, Paulo Hayakawa, the ageing Baroness Lydia Stahl, Sophie Knout, Rachid von Rosenheim, M. Igor, T.W.A. Levy, Otto da Silva and others whose names I’ve forgotten. With these shady characters, I trafficked gold, laundered counterfeit zlotys and sold wild grasses like hashish and marijuana to anyone who wished to graze on them. Eventually I enlisted in the French Gestapo. Badge number S. 1113. Working from the Rue Lauriston.

  I had been bitterly disappointed by the Milice. There, the only people I had met were boy scouts just like the brave lads in the Résistance. Darnand was an out-and-out idealist.

  I felt more comfortable around Pierre Bonny, Henri Chamberlin-Lafont and their acolytes. What’s more, on the Rue Lauriston I met up with my old ethics teacher, Joseph Joanovici.

  To the killers in the Gestapo, Joano and I were the two in-house Jews. The third was in Hamburg. His name was Maurice Sachs.

  One tires of everything. In the end I left my two girlfriends and the merry little band of crooks who jeopardized my health. I followed an avenue as far as the Danube. It was dark, snow was falling benignly. Would I throw myself into the river or not? Franz-Josefs-Kai was deserted, from somewhere I could hear snatches of a song, ‘Weisse Weihnacht’, ah yes, people were celebrating Christmas. Miss Evelyn used to read me Dickens and Andersen. What joy the next morning to find thousands of toys at the foot of the tree. All this happened in the house on the Quai Conti, on the banks of the Seine. An exceptional childhood, a magical childhood I no longer have time to tell you about. An elegant swan dive into the Danube on Christmas Eve? I was sorry I had not left a farewell note for Hilda and Yasmine. For example: ‘I will not be home tonight, for the night will be black and white.’ No matter. I consoled myself with the thought that these two whores had probably never read Gérard de Nerval. Thankfully, in Paris, no one would fail to see the link between Nerval and Schlemilovitch, the two winter suicides. I was incorrigible. I was prepared to appropriate another man’s death just as I had appropriated the pens of Proust and Céline, the paintbrushes of Modigliani and Soutine, the gurning faces of Groucho Marx and Chaplin. My tuberculosis? Had I not stolen it from Franz Kafka? I could still change my mind and die like him in the Kierling sanatorium not far from here. Nerval or Kafka? Suicide or sanatorium? No, suicide did not suit me, a Jew has no right to commit suicide. Such luxury should be left to Werther. What then? Turn up at Kierling sanatorium? Could I be sure that I would die there, like Kafka?

  I did not hear him approach. He brusquely shoves a badge into my face on which I read polizei. He asks for my papers. I’ve forgotten them. He takes me by the arm. I ask him why he does not use his handcuffs. He gives a reassuring little laugh.

  ‘Now, now, sir, you’ve had too much to drink. The Christmas spirit, probably. Come on now, I’ll take you home. Where do you live?’

  I obstinately refuse to give him my address.

  ‘Well, in that case I have no choice but to take you to the station.’

  The apparent kindness of the policeman is getting on my nerves. I’ve already worked out that he belongs to the Gestapo. Why not just tell me straight out? Maybe he thinks I will put up a fight, scream like a stuck pig? Not at all. Kierling sanatorium is no match for the clinic where this good man plans to take me. First, there will be the customary formalities: I will be asked for my surname, my first name, my date of birth. They will ensure I am genuinely ill, force me to take some sinister test. Next, the operating theatre. Lying on the table, I will wait impatiently for my surgeons Torquemada and Ximénes. They will hand me an x-ray of my lungs which I will see are nothing but a mass of hideous tumour
s like the tentacles of an octopus.

  ‘Do you wish us to operate or not?’ Dr Torquemada will ask me calmly.

  ‘All we need do is transplant two stainless steel lungs,’ Dr Ximénes will gently explain.

  ‘We have a superior professional conscientiousness,’ Dr Torquemada will say.

  ‘Together with an acute interest in your health,’ said Dr Ximénes.

  ‘Unfortunately, most of our patients love their illness with a fierce passion and consequently see us not as surgeons . . .’

  ‘ . . . but as torturers.’

  ‘Patients are often unjust towards their doctors,’ Dr Ximénes will add.

  ‘We are forced to treat them against their will,’ Dr Torquemada will say.

  ‘A thankless task,’ Dr Ximénes will add.

  ‘Do you know that some patients in our clinic have formed a union?’ Dr Torquemada will ask me. ‘They have decided to strike, to refuse to allow us to treat them . . .’

  ‘A serious threat to the medical profession,’ Dr Ximénes will add. ‘Especially since the unionist fever is infecting all sectors of the clinic . . .’

  ‘We have tasked a very scrupulous practitioner, Dr Himmler, to crush this rebellion. He is systematically performing euthanasia on all the union members.’

  ‘So what do you decide . . .’ Dr Torquemada will ask me, ‘the operation or euthanasia?’

  ‘There are no other possible alternatives.’

  Events did not unfold as I had expected. The policeman was still holding my arm, telling me he was walking me to the nearest police station for a simple identity check. When I stepped into his office, the Kommisar, a cultured SS officer intimately familiar with the French poets, asked: