An Infinity of Mirrors

by Richard Condon

  “It’s quite tricky, actually. Of course Canaris has no idea that Veelee might refuse the post. But if Veelee does refuse then the whole thing must come to the attention of General von Fritsch, and if that happens Guderian won’t be able to keep the blinds down and I will be able to be of no help whatsoever. Therefore Guderian, who damned well needs Veelee in his future tank army, asked me point-blank what Veelee would do if he was approached. I told him I would let him know this evening.”

  “Are you going to Wuensdorf?”

  “There is nothing to be decided at Wuensdorf.”

  “Veelee is there.”

  “But you are here. Forgive me, oh God, please forgive me, Paule, but it is you who must decide this thing.”

  “Tell me what I must do, Hansel.” She looked down at her hands, tightly gripped together, as she spoke.

  “Let me say that I am … we are—the army, all of us—are very grateful to you for this.”

  “Tell me, Hansel.”

  “All right, love. I have been assigned to Rome for special duty. Gretel is going to Wusterwitz. This would be a good time for you to take Paul-Alain out into the country, into the good fresh air and away from all this intrigue. If you were to tell Veelee that you had decided that you want very much to go with Gretel—”

  “Thank you, Hansel darling,” was all she could manage to say.

  Veelee’s favorite dish in all the world was Gefuellte Kalbsbrust. Four months before, in a burst of love, Paule had sent the recipe to Maître Gitlin in Paris, requesting that he ask Benoit Lesrois if he would be good enough to consult with the best chefs about how the recipe might be improved. Benoit Lesrois had taken his work seriously because the request had come from Paule, the witness to the greatest meal he had ever eaten in his life; in fact, he hinted that perhaps now that so many years had gone past she might agree to reveal the name of the restaurant in which her father had won the wager. There had been no further word until the recipe had arrived, the day before Paule’s lunch with Hansel. The letter to Paule from Lesrois explained that he had eaten fourteen different versions of Gefuellte Kalbsbrust while seeking the best recipe and had traveled four hundred and thirty-two kilometers. The recipe had finally been developed to M. Lesrois’ satisfaction by Lucien Courau in the rue Surcouf. Lesrois favored a Labastide-de-Levis, from the Gaillac hillsides of Tarn, if young enough, to accompany the dish. If that was not readily available, she could feel secure with a Pfirseichberg of the exposed Mamburg slopes at Turckheim in Alsace.

  The recipe had come at such a perfect time that Paule dashed off a note to M. Lesrois telling him all about Miss Willmott and giving her address in America. On her return home after lunch with Hansel, she gave the servants the evening off, rolled up her sleeves and began to prepare Gefuellte Kalbsbrust, à la française.

  The telephone was ringing as Veelee came in the front door. He moved across the square hall to answer it, yelling, “What’s that wonderful smell?”

  “Gefuellte Kalbsbrust!” Paule shouted from the kitchen. “And I made it all by myself!”

  “What!” He picked up the phone. “Hello? Yes. Very good, I’ll be there.” He hung up hastily and strode toward the kitchen.

  “You made it! The French touch!”

  “I don’t know what wine to have with it.”

  “Wine? Are you crazy? With a dish like this? We have beer.” He grabbed her and kissed her, then lifted her and whirled her around and kissed her again.

  “Who called?”

  “What? Oh. Wuensdorf. General Guderian just missed me. He wants to see me at the Bendlerstrasse tomorrow morning.”

  Paule’s throat tightened. “Just routine?”

  “Oh, sure. He runs out of tank officers to talk to.”

  Veelee watched with awe as Paule served the dinner. “It looks like Gefuellte Kalbsbrust,” he said. As he tasted it his eyes glazed over and a look of ecstasy spread over his face.

  “Paule!”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “It is magnificent. My God, what did you do to it? How did you do it?”

  She shrugged lightly and looked at him helplessly. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I used Gretel’s recipe—I only did what Gretel told me.”

  He began to eat rapidly. “This is the greatest Gefuellte Kalbsbrust I have ever tasted.” She filled his plate again, and again. When he finally pushed himself away from the table he was dazed.

  She put more beer in front of him. This must be like the end of life, she thought. When he was gone there would be left only a high, blank stone wall. She pushed herself to tell him what she was about to do with both of their lives, because she hoped that he might refuse to leave her for a reason so frivolous as whether he would win another pip on his shoulder in his army. She stared at him trying to erase any sign of sadness from her eyes.

  “Veelee?”

  “Anything, my beloved.” No one who had ever lived, she thought, could smile like Veelee.

  “Would you mind if Paul-Alain and I moved to Wusterwitz with Gretel for a while?”

  He blinked. He did not answer. She felt her throat tighten. She gripped her hands together tightly, under the table. Perhaps he would refuse to let her go. If he refused they would mean more to him than the army. If he rejected his army, perhaps, in a shorter time than she had ever dared to dream, she could persuade him to leave the army. They might get away. They might be together forever and get away. She made herself speak again. “Hansel is going to Rome and Gretel will be in Wusterwitz alone, and I thought Wusterwitz would be good for the baby and less tense for me.”

  He looked at her gravely. His right hand slapped the table lightly. “Of course! Why, you won’t even know that Berlin is a part of Germany when you are in Wusterwitz. They are our people. There are village Nazis, of course, but they are our Nazis. Let them wear their uniforms and have parades, but you are the wife of Colonel von Rhode.”

  She had heard her life stop. In the course of one afternoon Veelee was being subtracted from her life. “What will you do?” she asked him.

  “The same old thing. I’ll soldier. They always have ten jobs ready. But, you’ll love it at Wusterwitz. It’s really beautiful.” He shivered. “How exciting those two old houses are to me.”

  “Perhaps you should go to Wusterwitz and I should go to Wuensdorf.” She giggled.

  “No more Wuensdorf. I feel it in my experienced old army bones.”

  “No?”

  “I think I might put in for new assignment when I see Guderian tomorrow. It’s been a long time, in a way.”

  “Where?”

  “They’ll tell me. So Hansel has been posted to Rome. They swear by old Hansel. He’s a clever one, that old Hansel.”

  Paule nodded and managed a smile. “Yes,” she said. “Hansel is a very clever one.”

  Within eleven days Veelee was reassigned to special duty in Spain. He was assigned to work under the code name of Rabs, as Admiral Canaris’s personal representative to General Franco’s headquarters. Minister of War Blomberg’s representative, Colonel Warlimont, as part of the military mind imitating children at their games, had been in Franco’s favor since September, 1936; and Admiral Canaris’s representative, who had been with General Franco since Morocco, had recently had the bad fortune to die. The Admiral was most anxious to place another man of skill and background in Spain, a man who could command influence at headquarters by supplying information on the local situation superior to Warlimont’s, so that when the Fuehrer asked his questions the Canaris answers, not the Blomberg answers, would be the best answers.

  The Admiral’s selection of Colonel von Rhode was a calculated risk based upon the Colonel’s already proven superiority to Warlimont on the tactics of a war of movement and on the coordination of combined supporting operations. Franco was attacking; therefore Colonel von Rhode would shine in his eyes.

  Admiral Canaris was intensely irritated with Faupel, the German ambassador to Franco’s headquarters, who was becoming more and more o
pen in his support of General Franco’s opponent in the Falange, Manuel Hedilla Larrey. This gaucherie the Admiral called a “typical manifestation” of the Dienstelle Ribbentrop, the surrogate Foreign Office which operated solely on funds from the Adolf Hitler Spende, in direct competition with the legal German Foreign Office.

  Colonel von Rhode need not fear inactivity in Spain, Admiral Canaris explained. General Sperrle, commander of the Condor Legion, loathed Ambassador Faupel so much that he refused to receive him, and at the moment things were rather ticklish because General Franco had requested that Faupel be replaced. “Only a man as stupidly wooden as Ribbentrop could have found a man as woodenly stupid as Faupel,” the Admiral told Veelee. Von Rhode’s primary assignment was to see that Faupel was recalled as soon as possible; then, for reasons the Admiral did not specify, to see that Sperrle was returned to Berlin for reassignment. Veelee said blandly that he was no hand at intrigue; in fact, he had no resources to accommodate intrigue whatsoever. The Admiral replied coldly that all he was expected to do was to supply full information from General Franco’s headquarters and that, as always in history, the conspirators would provide their own intrigues.

  Veelee babbled along as Paule got him packed, with the baby seated in a high chair to preside over the meeting so that Veelee could punctuate his report with kisses on the baby’s cheeks and neck. “It’s a wonderful chance, you know, really it is,” he said happily. “Thoma’s tanks are in the thick of it, and they are coming up against Russian armor regularly now, ever since Guadalajara. Very heavy stuff. Really interesting.”

  “You just stay sitting in a tent somewhere, I suppose,” Paule replied.

  “This morning I persuaded Guderian to pass the word to Thoma to take nine of my tank studies into actual combat. Tremendous opportunity. After this, even stone-headed artillerymen like Brauchitsch and Keitel will have to accept tanks and reappraise the whole order of battle.”

  “I suppose a lot of Spaniards will have to get killed to prove the effectiveness of the nine studies?”

  He looked at her blankly. “Russians, also. That’s part of the profession. They can kill us, too, you know. Russian armor is much heavier than ours, love, thanks to that God-damn artilleryman Brauchitsch.” He helped her close the last bag, then picked up the baby. “Your old father will be a general soon, Paul-Alain, and then we’ll go off to Italy like Uncle Hansel and let the workingmen fight the wars.” He tossed the baby toward the ceiling and the child gurgled happily. “I hate to hurt your feelings, darling,” he said, “but Paul-Alain is the most German-looking baby I ever saw.”

  Then, before she knew it, he was gone. He kissed her lingeringly, murmured words about writing and about always loving each other—and then he was gone, out of her life. She never saw him again as she saw him standing at the top of the stairs, grinning and waving, his left arm held high. She never saw him like that again.

  Fourteen

  “They still talk about my grandfather’s wedding here,” Gretel said, as they drove along the poplar-lined drive through broad meadows toward the two huge houses suspended in time on the side of a hill. “It began with a squadron of mounted postillions sounding the wedding march on hunting horns. Then came the hussars on matched silver horses—I don’t think they were matched at all, but that’s what happens when stories are retold. We do have signed books showing that ambassadors and special envoys from all the royal houses were here. I suppose the Kaiser came—he usually found a reason to be at our parties, but it’s hardly likely that anyone would have the brass to ask him to sign a book.”

  Paule was so filled with her new surroundings at Wusterwitz and seeing them through Paul-Alain’s eyes that she settled peacefully into her new life. Veelee wrote passionate love letters, when he could get them out of Spain by fellow officers who would mail them from Germany. Within a few weeks she had letters postmarked Zwickau, Aurich, Bad Reichenhall and Nagold—which destroyed her conception that all officers came from East Prussia. “The smartest ones come from East Prussia,” Gretel said loyally. “They’ve been at it the longest. The stupidest come from Hanover. Have you ever known any French officers?”

  “No, but once Papa played Maréchal Ney, so I know the dress uniforms.”

  “I adore French officers. I had an affair with a perfect brigadier when we were posted in Paris in 1919—during the business of the Treaty.”

  “Gretel!”

  “Well, I’ve never known such a perfect lover. He made seduction so easy. I mean, what was the sense of coming to Paris at all if … Well, anyway, Hansel was up to his ears with von Seeckt’s worries over the Treaty, and our whole staff was in such a flat that—”

  “Who was he?”

  “He was—” Gretel’s jaw dropped. “His name was—” Her face turned bright red. “My God, Paule!”

  “Gretel, darling, what is the matter?”

  “He said—I mean, he made no effort to hide it, and he was in uniform whenever I came to his flat—he said he was Brigadier Paul Bernheim.”

  “Papa!”

  “Do you have a picture of your father?”

  “Oh, yes! Oh, I am sure it was Papa. It must have been Papa!” She unsnapped the locket on the gold chain around her neck which held a picture of Bernheim and one of Veelee and handed it to Gretel. Her sister-in-law had only to glance at it. “It is him! Oh, Paule, he was the only man I have ever known beyond Hansel.”

  “Goodness, he must have been dashing as a brigadier.”

  “It had never occurred to me to connect you with him, because you had said that no one in your family was ever in the army.”

  “Papa frequently did that sort of thing,” Paule said. “It was to inspire confidence. If you had been a banker’s wife he would have posed as a banker. Why, a great love of his was a scientist, quite famous really, who dealt in the most abstruse sort of work. Papa pored over monographs and pamphlets on her subject, as though he were learning a starring role, and then led her into bed—like that!” She snapped her fingers proudly.

  “But—how did you know all this?”

  “His wives would tell me. They were often lonely, but it was impossible not to feel proud of Papa if you were in the family. And they would tell me stories of his courtship of them, and they would repeat the current gossip about him—which of course always came to them first.”

  Gretel’s cheeks were still pink. “I feel like a girl again just talking about him,” she said.

  Paule nodded with pride. “The flat, I am sure, was on the Avenue Gabriel?”

  “Yes, but he took me to a small hotel in Versailles first.” She sighed. “We tangoed for hours late at night—though heaven knows we did not rest much in between.”

  Paule laughed delightedly and felt young again.

  Berlin seemed to be a galaxy away. The months passed from the multicolored northern autumn to the stark black and white of winter. Paul-Alain grew taller and blond and sturdy; he was so much like his father that it astounded both Paule and Gretel. They walked a great deal. Gretel spoke the local dialect flawlessly, but to Paule it sounded like a Mandarin singing in Gaelic. They drank endless cups of coffee. When they went calling they were always invited to have coffee. The ritual was to refuse so that they could be asked again. When the offer was made a third time it had to be accepted, and the cup would be filled again and again until the drinker turned it upside down. Then the process began once more until the cup was turned over a second time and a spoon placed on top of it.

  She spent as much time with Paul-Alain as he would allow. He had begun to discover that older boys were allowed to risk their necks jumping from the tops of barns or sliding down the branches of spruce trees higher than houses, so he had to be watched. He played with a huge set of toy soldiers which they had found in his great-grandfather’s study and with which the Battle of Waterloo, in which four of his ancestors had participated, could be restaged in detail. Great-grandfather’s room was Paul-Alain’s favorite place when the weather went wrong. It was a muse
um of battle flags, swords, rifles, dirks, sabers, cannon balls and bullets. On the shelves were journal upon journal, written in a clear, minute hand, which described war as the greatest game of all.

  Listening to the old soldiers in the region was a concomitant pleasure. Had Paul-Alain been six or seven instead of four, he might have attached himself to one of the old ruins who strode about remembering battles and commands, the details of which had been blurred by hundreds of other accounts heard in so many barracks and bars. Wusterwitz was a vast outdoor old soldiers’ home, and a vaster young soldier’s pasture.

  To counteract the influence of the military atmosphere, each Friday night Paule would pass on to her son the lore her father had so carefully told her about the honor and valor of the Jews.

  “One thousand years ago there was a great scholar in France called Rashi, whose full name was Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki. He was born in Troyes, which is not far from Paris, in 1040. He studied in Germany, just as you will study in Germany, then returned to Troyes, where he founded a school of his own. There were ten thousand Gentiles and only one hundred Jews in Troyes, and Rashi’s school was attended by Jewish scholars from all over the world. No gulf of hostility separated Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages; Rashi sang the hymns of the Church, he taught the local priests Hebrew melodies, and he translated French lullabies into Hebrew. He told the story of the passages of the Talmud in the language of Troyes of his day with warmth and scholarship; his style had such wit and elegance that it seemed as though the original Hebrew was French. Rashi’s children became teachers and his grandchildren became teachers, and when he finished his work it was sung by all the rabbis that the Talmud had at last been completed.”

  Hansel’s aide-de-camp telephoned from the Bendlerstrasse early one afternoon in February and explained carefully that Hansel would arrive at Wusterwitz the following morning. Gretel tried to learn more, though her experience told her this would be impossible. She had thought Hansel was still in Italy, and she sensed trouble because he had not telephoned himself.