by Alan Furst
The group at the next table had been attentive. One pugnacious little man, balding, nostrils flared, the reek of his mildewed room floating over their aperitifs, said “Revanchiste.” He didn’t say it to them, quite, or to his friends, perhaps he meant it for the world at large.
They looked at him. Revanchist, irredentist Hungarian fascists, he meant, seething with Red Front indignation. But Morath and Polanyi were not that, they were of the Hungarian Nation, as the nobility was called, Magyars with family histories that went back a thousand years, and they were quite prepared, with chair leg and wine bottle, to throw the whole crowd out into the rue Beaujolais.
When the group at the next table had returned, ostentatiously, to minding its own business, Polanyi carefully folded the medal back into its wrapping and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“He spent a long time dying,” Morath said. “Not in pain, and he wasn’t sad—he just had a hardheaded soul, it didn’t want to go.”
From Polanyi, a tender little snort of pleasure as he tasted the veal.
“Also,” Morath went on, “he wanted me to tell you something.”
Polanyi raised his eyebrows.
“It had to do with the death of his grandfather, who was ninety-five, he thought, and who had died in the same bed. The family knew the time had come, they were all gathered around. Suddenly, the old man became agitated and started to talk. Sandor had to lean close in order to hear him. ‘Remember,’ he whispered, ‘life is like licking honey . . .’ He said it three or four times, and Sandor could tell there was more. At last, he managed—‘licking honey off a thorn.’ ”
Polanyi smiled, acknowledging the story. “It’s been twenty years,” he said, “since I saw him. When it was no longer Hungary, I didn’t want anything to do with it, I knew it would be destroyed.” He took a sip of the wine, then more. “You want some, Nicholas? I’ll have them bring a glass.”
“No, thank you.”
“I wouldn’t go up there,” Polanyi said. “That was weak. And I knew it.” He shrugged, forgiving himself.
“He didn’t hold it against you.”
“No, he understood. His family was there?”
“All sorts. Daughters, a son, nieces and nephews, his brother.”
“Ferenc.”
“Yes, Ferenc. They had all the mirrors turned around. One old lady—immense, she cried, she laughed, she cooked me an egg—couldn’t stop talking about it. When the soul leaves, it mustn’t ever be allowed to see itself in the mirror. Because, she said, if it did, it might like looking at itself, and then it would be back, again and again.”
“I don’t think mine would. Did they put out the tub of water?”
“By the door. For death to wash his scythe. Otherwise, he would have to go all the way down to the creek, and somebody else in the house would die within the year.”
Polanyi daintily ate a chunk of bread he’d soaked in the sauce. When he looked up, the waiter was just passing by. “Hyacinthe, s’il vous plaît, a glass for my nephew here. And, while you’re at it, another carafe.”
They walked in the Palais Royal gardens after lunch. A dark afternoon, perpetual dusk, Polanyi and Morath like two ghosts in overcoats, moving slowly past the gray branches of the winter parterre.
Polanyi wanted to hear about Austria—he knew that Wehrmacht units were poised on the borders, ready to march in to suppress the “riots” organized by the Austrian Nazis. “If Hitler gets his Anschluss, there will be war in Europe,” he said.
“The trip was a nightmare,” Morath said. A nightmare that began with an absurdity—a fistfight in the corridor of the first-class car between two German harmonica salesmen. “Imagine, two stout men, both with mustaches, screaming insults at each other and flailing away with their little white fists. By the time we got them separated, they were bright red. We made them sit down, gave them water. We were afraid one of them would drop dead, and the conductor would have to stop the train and call for the police. Nobody, nobody in the car wanted that.”
“It started in Bucharest, no doubt,” Polanyi said. Roumania, he explained, had been forced to sell its wheat harvest to Germany, and the Reich finance ministry refused to pay in marks. They would only barter. For, exclusively, aspirin, Leica cameras, or harmonicas.
“Well, that was just the beginning,” Morath said. “We were still in western Hungary.” While the train stood in the station in Vienna, a man approximately Morath’s age, pale, trembling, had taken the seat across from him. When the family that occupied the rest of the compartment went off to the dining car, they had started to talk.
The man was a Viennese Jew, an obstetrician. He told Morath that the Jewish communities of Austria had been destroyed in a day and a night. It was, he said, sudden, chaotic, not like Berlin. By which he meant, Morath knew, a certain style of persecution—the slow, meticulous grinding of civil servants. Schreibtischtäter, he called them, “desk-murderers.”
The mobs had run wild in the city, led by Austrian SS and SA, hauling Jews out of their apartments—identified by the building custodians—and forcing them to scrub the walls free of slogans for Schuschnigg, the elected chancellor, in the plebiscite that Hitler refused to allow. In the wealthy Jewish suburb of Währing, they made the women put on their fur coats and forced them to clean the streets on their hands and knees, then stood over them and urinated on their heads.
Morath grew worried, the man was coming apart before his eyes. Would he care for a cigarette? No, he didn’t smoke. Perhaps a brandy. Morath offered to go to the dining car and bring it back. The man shook his head—what was the point? “We are finished,” he said. Eight hundred years of Jewish life, ended in one night. At the hospital, an hour before he’d made a run for it, a woman with a newborn child had taken it in her arms and jumped out a window on the top floor. Other patients crawled from their beds and fled into the streets. A young intern said he’d seen a man standing at a bar, the night before, who took a razor from his pocket and cut his throat.
“Was there no warning?” Morath said.
“Anti-Semites in political office,” the man said. “But you don’t sell your house because of that. A month ago, more or less, a few people left the country.” Of course there were some, he added, who’d gotten out in 1933, when Hitler came to power. He’d said, in Mein Kampf, that he meant to unite Austria with Germany. Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Führer! But reading the political future was like reading Nostradamus. His wife and children he’d put on a Danube steamer to Budapest, thank God, the last week in February. “It was her brother who did that. He came to the house, said we should leave, insisted. There was an argument, my wife in tears, bad feelings. In the end, I was so angry I let him have his way.”
“But, you stayed on,” Morath said.
“I had patients.”
They were silent for a moment. Outside, boys with swastika flags were running down the platform, screaming some kind of rhymed chant, their faces wild with excitement.
Polanyi and Morath sat on a bench in the gardens. It seemed very quiet there. A few sparrows working at the crumbs of a baguette, a little girl in a coat with a velvet collar, trying to play with a hoop and a stick while a nursemaid watched her.
“In the town of Amstetten,” Morath said, “just outside the station, they were waiting at a road crossing so they could throw rocks at the trains. We could see the police, standing around with their arms folded, they’d come to watch. They were laughing, it was a certain kind of joke. The whole thing had, more than anything, a terrible strangeness to it. I remember thinking, they’ve wanted this for a long time. Under all the sentiment and Schlag, was this.”
“Their cherished Wut,” Polanyi said. “You know the word.”
“Rage.”
“Of a particular kind, yes. The sudden burst of anger that rises from despair. The Germans believe it lies deep within their character; they suffer in silence, and then they explode. Listen to Hitler speak—it’s always, ‘How much longer must we endure . . . ,’ whatever it i
s. He can’t leave it alone.” Polanyi paused for a moment. “And now, with Anschluss, we will have the pleasure of their company on our border.”
“Will anything happen?”
“To us?”
“Yes.”
“I doubt it. Horthy will be summoned to meet with Hitler, he’ll bow and scrape, agree to anything. As you know, he has beautiful manners. Of course, what we actually do will not be quite what we’ve agreed to, but, even so, when it’s all over, we won’t keep our innocence. It can’t be done. And we will pay for that.”
For a time, they watched the people walking along the gravel paths, then Polanyi said, “These gardens will be lovely, in the spring. The whole city.”
“Soon, I hope.”
Polanyi nodded. “You know,” he said, “they fight wars, the French, but their country, their Paris, is never destroyed. Do you ever wonder how they do that?”
“They are clever.”
“Yes, they are. They are also brave. Foolish, even. But that’s not, in the end, how they save what they love. That they do by crawling.”
The eleventh of March, Morath thought. Too cold to sit in a garden, the air damp in a certain way, sharp, as though chilled in wet earth. When it began to sprinkle rain, Morath and Polanyi rose and walked in the covered arcade, past a famous milliner, a store that sold expensive dolls, a dealer in rare coins.
“And the Viennese doctor?” Polanyi said.
“Reached Paris, long after midnight. Although he did have trouble at the German border. They tried to send him back to Vienna, something not quite right with his papers. A date. I stood next to him throughout the whole filthy business. In the end, I couldn’t keep out of it.”
“What did you do, Nicholas?”
Morath shrugged. “Looked at them a certain way. Spoke to them a certain way.”
“And it worked.”
“This time.”
4 April 1938.
Théâtre des Catacombes. 9:20 P.M.
“Know him? Yes, I know him. His wife makes love to my wife every Thursday afternoon.”
“Really? Where?”
“In the maid’s room.”
Lines not spoken from the stage—would that they had been, Morath thought—but overheard in the lobby during intermission. As Morath and Cara worked their way through the crowd, they were noticed, the glances polite, covert. A dramatic couple. Cara’s face was not her best feature—it was soft and plain, hard to remember. Her best feature was long, honey-gold hair, beautiful scarves, and the ways she found to make people want her. For an evening of avant-garde theatre she had added a Gypsy skirt, with appropriate hoop earrings, and soft leather boots with the tops folded over.
Morath seemed taller than he was. He had black hair, thick, heavy, combed back from the forehead, a certain tightness around the eyes, “green” on his passport but very close to black, and all that darkness made him seem pale, a fin-de-siècle decadent. He’d once met a film producer, introduced by a mutual friend at Fouquet. “I usually make gangster films,” the man told him with a smile. “Or, you know, intrigue.” But, at the moment, a costume epic was soon to go into production. A large cast, a new version of Taras Bulba. Had Morath ever acted? He could play, possibly, “a chieftain.” The producer’s friend, a scrawny little man who looked like Trotsky, added, “A khan, maybe.”
But they were wrong. Morath had been eighteen years in Paris and the émigré life, with its appetizing privacy, and immersion in the city, all passion, pleasure, and bad philosophy, had changed the way he looked. It meant that women liked him more, meant that people didn’t mind asking him for directions in the street. Still, what the producer had seen remained, somewhere, just below the surface. Years earlier, toward the end of a brief love affair, a French woman said to him, “Why, you’re not at all cruel.” She had sounded, he thought, slightly disappointed.
Act II. A Room in Purgatory—The Following Day.
Morath shifted his weight, a pointless effort to get comfortable in the diabolical chair. Crossed his legs, leaned the other way. Cara clutched his arm—stop it. The row of seats, fixed on a wooden frame, went twelve across. Where did Montrouchet get them, he wondered. From some long-dead institution, no doubt. A prison? A school for horrible children?
On stage, the Seven Deadly Sins were harassing a gloomy Everyman. Poor soul, seated on a stool, wearing a gray shroud. “Ahh, but you slept through her funeral.” This well-meaning woman, no longer young, was probably Sloth—though Morath had been wrong two or three times when he’d actually tried watching the play. They had soft edges, the Sins. Either the playwright’s fault or Satan’s—Morath wasn’t sure. Pride was greedy, it seemed to him, and Greed upstaged Envy every chance he got. But then, Greed.
On the other hand, Gluttony wasn’t so bad. A plump young man, come to Paris from the provinces, trying for a career in theatre or the movies. Trouble was, the playwright hadn’t given him much to do. What could he say to poor, dead Everyman? You ate too much! Well, he made the best of what had been given him. Perhaps a prominent director or producer would come to watch the play, one never knew.
But one did know. Morath looked down at the program in his lap, the only permissible distraction to the white fog that rolled in from the stage. The back cover was given over to promotion—the critic from Flambeau Rouge, red torch, had found the play “Provocative!” Below that, a quote from Lamont Higson of The Paris Herald. “The Théâtre des Catacombes is the only Parisian theatre in recent memory to present plays of both Racine and Corneille in the nude.” There followed a list of sponsors, including one Mlle. Cara Dionello. Well, he thought, why not. At least a few of those poor beasts in Argentina, trudging down the ramp to the abattoir, added more to life than roast beef.
The theatre lay deep in the heart of the Fifth Arrondissement. Originally, there’d been a plan for Montrouchet to stage his performances at the catacombs themselves, but the municipal authority had been mysteriously cool to the possibility of actors capering about in the dank bone-rooms beneath the Denfert Rochereau Métro stop. In the end, he had had to make do with a mural in the lobby: piles of clown-white skulls and femurs sharply picked out in black.
“What? You forgot? That night by the river?” Morath returned from dreamland to find Lust, typecast, maybe seventeen, whispering her line as she slithered on her belly across the stage. Cara took his arm again, gentle this time.
Morath did not sleep at the avenue Bourdonnais that night, he returned to his apartment in the rue Richelieu, then left early the following morning to catch the Nord Express up to Antwerp. This was a no-nonsense train, the conductors brisk and serious, the seats filled with soldiers of commerce on the march along the ancient trade route. Besides the rhythm of the wheels on the track, the only sound in Morath’s compartment was the rustle of newsprint as a turned-over page of Le Figaro was snapped into place.
In Vienna, he read, the Anschluss was to be formalized by a plebiscite—the Austrian voter now prone to say Ja in order not to get his nose broken. This was, Hitler explained in a speech on 9 April, God’s work.
There is a higher ordering, and we are all nothing else than its agents. When on 9 March Herr Schuschnigg broke his agreement then in that second I felt that now the call of Providence had come to me. And that which then took place in three days was only conceivable as the fulfillment of the wish and will of Providence. I would now give thanks to Him who let me return to my homeland in order that I might now lead it into the German Reich! Tomorrow may every German recognize the hour and measure its import and bow in humility before the Almighty, who in a few weeks has wrought a miracle upon us.
So, Austria ceased to exist.
And the Almighty, not quite satisfied with His work, had determined that the fuddled Doktor Schuschnigg should be locked up, guarded by the Gestapo, in a small room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Metropole.
For the moment, Morath couldn’t stand any more. He put the paper down and stared out the window at tilled Flemish earth. The
reflection in the glass was Morath the executive—very good dark suit, sober tie, perfect shirt. He was traveling north for a meeting with Monsieur Antoine Hooryckx, better known, in business circles, as Hooryckx, the Soap King of Antwerp.
In 1928, Nicholas Morath had become half-owner of the Agence Courtmain, a small and reasonably prosperous advertising agency. This was a sudden, extraordinary gift from Uncle Janos. Morath had been summoned to lunch on one of the restaurant-boats and, while cruising slowly beneath the bridges of the Seine, informed of his elevated status. “You get it all eventually,” Uncle Janos said, “so you may as well have the use of it now.” Polanyi’s wife and children would be provided for, Morath knew, but the real money, the thousand kilometers of wheat field in the Puszta with villages and peasants, the small bauxite mine, and the large portfolio of Canadian railroad stock, would come to him, along with the title, when his uncle died.
But Morath was in no hurry, none of that race you up the stairs, grampa stuff for him. Polanyi would live a long time, that was fine with his nephew. The convenient part was that, with steady income assured, if Count Polanyi needed Nicholas to help him out, he was available. Meanwhile, Morath’s share of the profits kept him in aperitifs and mistresses and a slightly shabby apartment at a reasonably bonne adresse.
The Agence Courtmain had a very bonne adresse indeed but, as an advertising agency, it had first of all to advertise its own success. Which it did, along with various lawyers, stock brokerages, and Lebanese bankers, by renting an absurdly expensive suite of offices in a building on the avenue Matignon. More than likely owned, Courtmain theorized—the title of the société anonyme gave no indication—“by an Auvergnat peasant with goatshit in his hat.”
Sitting across from Morath, Courtmain lowered his newspaper and glanced at his watch.
“On time?” Morath said.
Courtmain nodded. He was, like Morath, very well dressed. Emile Courtmain was not much over forty. He had white hair, thin lips, gray eyes, and a cold, distant personality found magnetic by virtually everybody. He smiled rarely, stared openly, said little. He was either brilliant or stupid, nobody knew, and it didn’t seem terribly important. What sort of life he may have had after seven in the evening was completely unknown—one of the copywriters claimed that after everybody left the office, Courtmain hung himself up in the closet and waited for daylight.