One baritone voice cut in below all the others:
—Mr. Ballard, are you there? Can you hear me?
The voice came from the end of a long corridor and somehow Claude could not answer or open his eyes. He was on the fringe of a blackout, felt himself being wicked away.
—Sir, are you all right? We intend to get you out, just hold tight.
* * *
In later years, Claude would insist that this voice belonged to Herbert Hoover, the future president of the United States, and that he was calling to him as if he’d fallen down a mineshaft. When the Great Depression hit, Claude would lean in to the wireless in his hotel suite to parse the president’s speeches about the wintertime privations of the poor and the rallying of the American spirit, comparing the voice to what he’d burrowed into the back of his mind, when Herbert Hoover called his name and lifted him out of the darkening well.
30
Faux Paris
Claude often thought of the three-minute strip of war celluloid as his real masterpiece. The British and French used the footage as proof of German atrocities, not only in propaganda films but also as fodder in subsequent war-crimes trials. The Commission for Relief in Belgium used it to fuel fund-raising efforts and many Americans saw it as a sign that they should consider entering the war.
* * *
Hal Bender, still touring with his reels, saw the harrowing strip in London and wrote another letter to Claude, care of the Relief Commission, but this one never got through the mail censors. In Germany and occupied Belgium, The Victor’s Crown was never seen again. Oberstleutnant Graf Bessler was recalled to Berlin and spent the remainder of the war as a petty bureaucrat in charge of sourcing rubber for military bicycle tires.
* * *
Under the protection of the American Legation and the Red Cross, Claude was smuggled out of Brussels, slipping into France behind Ypres. After convalescing for a month in a hospital in Calais, he was given a choice of either returning to the United States via London or relocating to Paris. He chose the latter, not because he had any great affection for the city of his youth, but because he wanted to ensure there were no traces of the dreamer who’d set off almost twenty years earlier as an agent for the Lumière brothers. New Jersey and Hollywood were also impossible to imagine after a year filming the entrails of war.
* * *
Claude barely recognized Paris. Fearing a prolonged siege, the military had brought in livestock from the countryside, and the sound of lowing cattle filled the boulevards and streets. The bronze statues and stone monuments were heaped in sandbags, the Eiffel Tower trimmed with machine guns. The Louvre was closed, the paintings dispatched to Toulouse, and the train stations were glass-domed cities of gamboling dogs and head-scarfed refugees. Government palaces and grand hotels had been turned into military hospitals.
* * *
Women’s skirts, meanwhile, grew shorter, their footwear sturdier, and socialite magazines ran articles about what to wear when taking refuge from a zeppelin attack. New words were invented: a female postal worker was a factrice; a munitionnette was a woman working in a munitions factory. Bohemian Paris was also in retreat. Jean Cocteau was said to now work as a Red Cross ambulance driver.
* * *
Claude rented a room in Montparnasse, above a violinmaker, and took a job as a taxi driver. Celluloid film stock was almost impossible to obtain, so he stored his cameras and equipment under his narrow bed and forgot about picture making. Although Paris taxi drivers were notoriously impatient and irascible, they had become national heroes after hundreds of red Renault AG1s drove reservists up to the First Battle of the Marne. Dutifully following city regulations, the taxi drivers had kept their meters running and later sent the government the bill. Four thousand soldiers were taxied to the front in two days.
* * *
Claude took solace in the routine of driving the Renault twelve hours a day, in the winding chaos of the streets and in the glimpsed lives of his passengers. The motorcar was high, sleek, and narrow, designed for the serpentine passageways of the city, and he could comfortably seat three people in the sealed compartment behind the driver’s bench. Because he never heard their conversations, he had to surmise their pasts and futures from the initial directions and the payment of the fare. An accent, a weary look, a tattered scarf or ermine shawl. As he had with the looping mechanisms inside a projector and camera, he became intimate with the Renault’s engine, the way it stuttered in the cold and chortled after a long idle.
* * *
Despite his prewar film career and his footage of the Germans, no one seemed to know who Claude was in Paris, and he relished the anonymity. He walked past the installations of his former life as if they belonged to a museum of the past. The old aperture window of his garret roofline apartment. The Salpêtrière hospital, now full of wounded soldiers, where his old mentor, Londe, mapped the walking cadences of hysterics, the consumption institute where his sister died in a room filling with winter light. He was a wartime flâneur, taking walks of atonement through his old stomping grounds.
* * *
He sometimes thought about driving out to Lyon to make amends with the Lumière brothers, who were now investing in color autochrome photographs, but he couldn’t imagine what he would tell them, or why they would care. He ate one meal a day and drove until his whole body hummed. On Sunday afternoons, he bathed in the silty Seine as a kind of penance. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, he walked out into the streets to look up at the river of stars. With so many lights snuffed after curfew, the sky was a tumult of blackness and starlight above his head. In every way possible, his life was becoming smaller and simpler. He wanted to reduce daily existence to its struts and filaments, to some underlying structure that could not fill with deceit.
* * *
But his loneliness hung all about him, like a smell from the tanneries. At night, before the curfew, behind the wheel of the Renault, he saw the headlamps pick through the darkened streets and felt weightless of time and body, a floating witness to everything around him. His daytime visions and blackouts subsided but his dreams were run through with trench horrors and severed limbs. He never charged a fare for soldiers on leave. Sometimes, as he stared into a young Frenchman’s face, he tried to discern whether he would come back from the front. There were entire days where he felt clairvoyant and omniscient: That boy will die in flames. That woman has never loved anyone but herself.
* * *
By early 1918, everything had changed in the war. The Americans were now fighting in Europe, the Germans were bombing Paris and London with their Gotha heavy bombers, and the Paris-Geschütz—a ten-story siege gun with a range of eighty miles—had landed shells inside city churches and metro stations. Claude continued to drive his red Renault through the streets, the stained-glass windows removed from Notre Dame, the brothels overflowing with British and American enlistees.
* * *
Despite its hold on the city, the war now felt like an abstraction to Claude, a series of parabolas and probabilities. Without the daily footage of atrocities, it became newspaper ink and omnibus stories. He pictured the Paris Gun launching its ten-foot shells, saw them scraping the gas-blue flame of the stratosphere. On Good Friday 1918, a shell came through the roof of a church in Saint-Gervais, killing eighty-eight people. In his mind, there was nothing personal about this kind of carnage. It was both random and mathematical.
* * *
Then one morning the war took a ride in his taxi. A French officer and a military engineer directed him fifteen miles north of the city, to the quiet district of Maisons-Laffitte, where a secret and enormous faux Paris was being built on a different stretch of the Seine. The fake city was being designed to fool the Gotha bombers at night—complete with replicas of the Arc de Triomphe and Gare du Nord, fully functioning train tracks that carried empty carriages, mock buildings constructed like movie sets, their skylights painted with translucent paint to suggest the grimy lights of factories and warehou
ses.
* * *
They asked if Claude would be willing to supervise the optical effects, to ensure that the illusion was convincing from above. The project already employed dozens of theater set designers, electrical and mechanical engineers, carpenters, painters, and a hundred workmen. But they needed a film director’s eye and someone who also knew the German mind-set.
* * *
Since Claude wasn’t allowed to tell anyone of his new work, the military asked him to continue driving taxis during the day and to work on faux Paris at night. Each night, after dinner, he drove up to Maisons-Laffitte and toured the day’s progress. The rooftops were set facades, a skin of fabric, wood, and mastic, and he liked to view them from an observation booth that doubled as a train signal tower. But he needed more height if he was going to capture a Gotha pilot’s view. So he asked his military contacts to source a working Aeroscope camera, some celluloid, and a weather balloon.
* * *
Once a week, he attached a small basket to the balloon, positioned the rolling camera, and sent the apparatus up on the end of a thousand feet of rope. Just as the Germans radioed artillery calibrations from observation balloons at the front, Claude was able to adjust the mounting movie set by viewing it from above. Paris was a scroll of parchment, a glimpse of riverine light and hazy industrial skylights and steeples and gargoyles and trains. Germans had an eye for the symbolic, and for the aesthetically pleasing, so he made sure there were tiny painted wooden boats on the Seine with faint red pilot lights and mannequins dutifully night fishing.
* * *
The war ended before faux Paris could ever be fully tested. In a train compartment out in the French countryside, the rival powers signed a peace treaty and the Armistice swung through Europe at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, another mathematical portent. The treaty was signed at 5:00 a.m. but the fighting continued for six hours, a fact that would haunt Claude in later years, the idea that a few thousand men could be both alive and dead for a morning. When the church bells started pealing across Paris, when the students erupted into the streets, carrying soldiers aloft, Claude found himself heading south of the city in the Renault.
* * *
He drove for two days along chalky, tree-lined roads, through hamlets and villages and towns that were just now hearing of the Armistice, their cafés and taverns hung with flags. Burgundy vintners waved at him from their browning fields, dairy farmers from haylofts, the madness of a Paris taxi joyriding south. The world was full of fellow feeling, despite the bracing weather of November. They let him pay for petrol but nobody would let him pay for a meal or a glass of wine or a bed for the night. He shrugged when they asked him where he was headed, thanked them for their hospitality, and honked his horn patriotically as he headed farther south.
* * *
In redbrick Toulouse, the weather sharpened and he bought supplies and made enquiries about getting up into the Pyrenees. From the town of Axles-Thermes, with its casino and sulfur baths, the locals said, there was a mule road up into Andorra, but no passage for a motorcar. But he could motor into Spain and follow the white macadam road that led from La Seu d’Urgell up into the mountains. They warned him of Pyrenean storms, of lawless mountain clans, of the sawtooth massif where Catalan herders and smugglers had been hiding for a thousand years. When a grocer asked him what business took him to L’Andorre, he thought about all the ways he might answer. Finally, he said, Everything.
31
Andorra
A Paris taxi motoring into the main square of Andorra la Vella, the streets empty on a rainy November afternoon. A few dozen locals, up and down the valley, stricken with la gripe, dying in shuttered rooms under slate roofs, their doors marked with tiny yellow flags. After ravaging Europe for a year, the Spanish influenza had arrived in the Pyrenees just the month before. So it was a Catalan doctor in a wool cap who came out to meet the parked Renault, a surgical mask secured to his face under an umbrella. Around the square, a few onlookers appeared behind rain-streaked windowpanes.
* * *
The doctor asked whether Claude would submit to a physical examination on account of la gripe. Claude stepped under the umbrella and removed his jacket. The doctor listened to his lungs, took his temperature, looked down his throat, and asked him what brought him to town. He told the man that he was looking for the household of Sabine Montrose. The doctor fell quiet, recoiled into the ancient, empty room of Andorran discretion and secrecy. Claude said, I am her estranged husband, and this elicited a casual nod as the doctor pointed with his stethoscope to a church-spired town cleaved into the northern wall of the valley. Siempre arriba, en Ordino, cerca de la iglesia. He handed Claude a white cloth face mask.
* * *
As Claude cranked the engine of the Renault, the doctor asked in Catalan, then in French:
—Is it true?
—That I am her husband?
—That the war is over.
* * *
Claude nodded and settled behind the wheel to slowly release the clutch. It occurred to him for the first time that he had technically stolen the motorcar from his employer and driven it more than six hundred miles. He’d had the presence of mind to pack up all of his possessions, to slip into the crowded streets without his violinmaker landlord noticing his suitcase and equipment, but it was only now that he admitted that he had no plans to return to Paris.
* * *
He drove farther north into the valley in the pelting rain, wound up a rutted mule path, eventually parked the Renault alongside the ancient stone church in Ordino. A big house presided over the street, mortared in clay, roofed with blue slate, its tall windows shining behind a long wrought-iron balcony. Claude found his way to an archway that gave onto a courtyard garden with a fountain and a set of zigzagging steps that led to the house’s main entrance.
* * *
He was out of breath by the time he reached the top landing, hands on hips, staring at the small yellow flag nailed to the weathered old door. He stamped the mud off his boots, knocked, waited, clutched the face mask between his hands, felt light-headed from the smell of rain and wet limestone.
* * *
Helena, still brisk in her seventies, opened the door and dried her hands down a white apron, clearly bothered by this mid-afternoon intrusion. It took her a few squinting seconds to recognize the pale wire of a man standing before her in the rain, to complete the mental calculation that ported Claude Ballard from the Palisades to the Pyrenees. She shook her head, rubbed her bare arms, her eyes blotting with tears.
* * *
I have come to see Sabine and the children, he said unnecessarily, but Helena was still staring through her own memories and Claude saw himself as she might, the way he’d shown up with his Alsatian undertaker’s hat on Sabine’s fortieth birthday, waiting out in the hotel hallway with his light box in tow, shimmering Parisian boulevards and plummeting cats onto a bedsheet that doubled as a screen, and now he stood there all over again, shifting his weight from foot to foot, a ravaged ghost in the alpine rain. Had he been standing out in the rain for twenty-two years? Gesturing to the yellow flag on the door, he said, Qui?
* * *
She said nothing, but opened the door wider and took his drenched overcoat. She led him silently toward the great room that overlooked the valley, his boots dripping as he walked. The room was a perched jewel box, dark wooden rafters hung with ironwork candelabras, fencing masks and French impressionists on the walls, gold-and-blue Persian rugs brightening the big-timbered floors. He had the sensation of walking into the back of a theater during a play, of actors blocked and arranged and facing downstage. Two women stood at the window, watching a cataract of sunlight widening above the other end of the valley. He’d expected a different scene and play, perhaps a salon farce, a few pompous expat literary types and serious-minded actors, maybe Pavel standing on a chair pontificating about the subtle machinery of the mind. Standing inside this jewel box, he understood that time was a pebble, something he co
uld slip into his pocket or rest under his tongue. Helena sighed and it broke the spell at the window.
* * *
Cora was the first to turn around, now a pretty green-eyed woman at the cusp of twenty. Almost in fright, she touched the back of Sabine’s hand, and the actress turned slowly around. Claude remained motionless, studying her face amid the glassed-in clouds and vales and summit balds behind her head. She came into focus as a straight-backed woman in her early sixties, wearing a gray velvet day dress. Her hair was neatly pinned up, off her long pale neck, and her face was the color of candlewax. In all the years he’d stared at Sabine through the viewfinder, he had never seen this particular face. Wordless, unmade, inscrutable.
* * *
He felt emptied out by her wan expression, bird-boned with relief. For years he’d imagined this moment as a reckoning, feared that the old ache would thicken in his throat, mangle through his stomach, but now he felt light and steady and desireless on his feet. He’d plucked a bomb out of a celery garden, exhibited German atrocities while Berliners sat in feathered hats, driven a taxicab from Paris to the Pyrenees, filmed hysterics, his dying sister, a dark melodrama that had changed everything. Now it all seemed to have happened to someone else. But this particular emptiness was happening to him alone. He had traveled years and continents and hundreds of miles to feel this strain of nothingness. There was no way—or reason—to speak any of this, so he just looked at her blankly.
The Electric Hotel: A Novel Page 35