Wall assumes his initial posture, facing the door, which is again partially open; but instead of the inhospitable chaperone, a young woman (of about thirty) is standing motionless in the open space, staring at the stranger, who indicates his surprise by an embarrassed smile. He stammers some incomprehensible excuses in German. But she continues staring at him in silence, her expression serious, doubtless friendly, though touched with a melancholy, remote sweetness, strongly contrasting with the cavalier exuberance of the adolescent girl at the window. And if the figures of the two seem to have some features in common—particularly the almond shape of the large green eyes, the prepossessing fleshy mouth, a straight delicate nose of the style known as Grecian, though more marked in the older of the two—the latter’s dark brown hair is parted down the center in the fashion of the twenties, emphasizing a difference which is surely not merely that of the two generations. Her pupils move imperceptibly, as do her just-parted lips.
The seductive lady with the appealingly pursed lips and the faintly melancholy expression finally speaks, her voice warm and low, emanating from deep in her chest or even lower, her French flavored with the intonations of ripe cherries and fleshy apricots—sensual resonances, one might say in her case—noticed previously in the little girl: “Don’t pay too much attention to Gigi, nor to what she says or might do.… The child’s a little crazy, it’s something to do with her age, she’s just fourteen … and she has such unfortunate friends.”
Then, after a more significant pause, while Wall is still hesitating about what he should say, she adds with the same almost absent deliberation: “Doctor von Brücke hasn’t lived here for the last ten years. I’m so sorry.… My own name is over here. [With a graceful movement of her bare arm, she indicates the bronze plaque above the bell.] But you can call me Jo, it’s simpler, though Germans pronounce it ‘Io,’ pursued once by a gadfly across Greece and Asia Minor, after Jupiter raped her in the form of a fiery-tinted cloud.”
Joëlle Kast’s smile, at this incongruous mythological evocation, plunges the visitor into a labyrinth of dreamy suppositions. And therefore he ventures, almost at random: “And what would there be to be sorry about, if I’m not being indiscreet?”
“In the breakup with Daniel? [A throaty laugh suddenly animates the young woman, deep and cooing as if it emanated from her entire body.] As far as I’m concerned, nothing! No regrets! I was speaking in your behalf, on account of your investigation … Monsieur Wallon.”
“Ah, you know who I am?”
“Pierre Garin told me you were coming.… [A silence] Do come in! I’m getting cold out here.”
Wall takes advantage of the long dark hallway through which she leads him—to a sort of salon, also rather dark, crowded with various pieces of furniture, huge decorative dolls, and various more or less unexpected objects (such as are found in junk shops)—to consider the turn his situation has just taken. Has he fallen into another trap? Sitting on a stiff red plush chair, its mahogany arms protected with heavy ornamental bronze insets, he inquires, having opted for the most natural tone of voice he can manage: “You know Pierre Garin?”
“Of course!” she answers with a slightly weary shrug of her shoulders. “Everyone here knows Pierre Garin. As for Daniel, I was married to him for five years, just before the war.… He was Gigi’s father.”
“Why do you say he ‘was’?” the traveler asks, after a moment’s reflection.
The lady looks at him without answering, as if pondering the question, unless she’s suddenly thought of something entirely different, then finally announces in a neutral, indifferent tone of voice: “Gigi’s an orphan. Colonel von Brücke was murdered by Israeli agents two nights ago, in the Soviet zone … just opposite the apartment where my daughter and I lived, after my repudiation early in 1940.”
“What do you mean by ‘repudiation’?”
“Daniel had the right, or even the duty to do it. According to the new laws of the Reich I was Jewish, and he was a high officer. For the same reason, he’s never acknowledged Gigi, who was born just before we got married.”
“You speak French without a trace of a German or Middle European accent.…”
“I was brought up in France and I am French.… But at home we spoke a sort of Serbo-Croatian as well. My parents came from Klagenfurt.… ‘Kast’ is a distorted abbreviation of ‘Kastanjevica,’ a small town in Slovenia.”
“And you stayed in Berlin all through the war?”
“You must be joking! My status became increasingly risky, awkward for our everyday life. I scarcely dared leave the house.… Daniel would visit us once a week.… Early in the spring of ’41 he managed to find a way for us to leave. I still had my French passport. We settled in Nice, in the Italian zone of occupation. Oberführer von Brücke left for the Eastern front with his unit, in the strategic information services.”
“He was a Nazi?”
“Probably, like everybody else.… I don’t think the question ever came up. As a German officer, he obeyed his country’s orders, and Germany was National Socialist.… Actually, I don’t know what he could have been doing during our last interview, in Provence, until his return to Berlin a few months ago. When the front was broken in Mecklenburg after Admiral Dönetz’s surrender, Daniel might have joined his family at Stralsund, demobilized by the Russians as he was for obscure political reasons. For my part, I came back here as soon as I could, with the French occupation forces. I speak English as easily as I do German and I manage pretty well in Russian, which has a number of points in common with Slovenian. I soon sent for Gigi, through the Red Cross, and we got back without difficulty to our old house on the canal, miraculously spared by the war. I had kept my Berlin administrative papers proving that I would be recovering my home here, and that Gigi herself was born here. A nice American lieutenant managed to clear up the situation: certificate of registration, ration cards, and all the rest.…”
The former Madame Joëlle von Brücke, née Kastan-jevica, known as Kast (“Call me Jo, it’s simpler”), presents all these confidences with such an obvious concern for clarity, for coherence and precision, specifying each time the places and the dates of her peregrinations without forgetting their quite justified motives, that Boris Robin, who had asked for no such thing, cannot help finding her story suspicious if not highly unlikely. It was as if she were reciting a lesson carefully learned by heart, being careful to leave nothing out. And no doubt her reasonable, detached tone, without rancor or excitement, counts for a good deal in the insidious sensation of falseness which it inspires. Pierre Garin himself might have made up the whole of this edifying odyssey. To clear his conscience, he’ll have to interrogate the eccentric adolescent, surely less carefully prepared than her mother. But why does the latter, who seems neither very expansive nor garrulous by nature, so insist on planting in a stranger’s mind these tedious details concerning her family chronicle? What’s being hidden by her inexplicable zeal, her niggling though defective memory (for all the apparent exhaustiveness of the narrative)? Why was she in such a hurry to get back to this strange city almost completely in ruins, difficult of access, perhaps still dangerous for her very life? Exactly what does she know about von Brücke’s death? Did she have an essential part to play in it? Or just a walk-on role? What riddle is the J.K. apartment the heart of? How can she be so sure of the specific scene of the crime? And how, on the other hand, can Pierre Garin have guessed that the traveler has chosen, at the last moment, the one passport made out to the name of Wallon for use in the city’s western zone? Was Maria, the charming servant in the Hôtel des Alliés, let in on the secret? And finally, what means of existence did the so-called Jo have all this time in Berlin, where she immediately sent for her underage daughter, who of course would have continued her studies more easily in a school in Nice or Cannes?7
Pondering these mysteries, Wall, whose eyes have now grown accustomed to the dim light, which makes the large salon—with its heavy red curtains drawn almost completely across the win
dows—so obscure, inspects more closely its decoration of some oneiric flea market, an oppressive attic, or a shop of buried souvenirs, where the presence, among the more or less miniaturized children’s toys, of numerous life-size dolls with suggestive accoutrements, contrasting with their juvenile expressions, would be likely to suggest some 1900s brothel much more than a toy shop for little girls. And the visitor’s imagination speculates once again concerning the kind of enterprise carried on in this venerable middle-class residence of an officer of the Wehrmacht.
* * *
Note 7 – The various questions our anxious narrator pretends to be asking himself with a pseudo-naiveté allow him to commit at least one mistake in the complicated arrangement of his pawns: he admits incidentally that he suspects the precious Maria—and not the Mahler twins—of working for the DAS, whereas that morning she didn’t even understand our language. Stranger still, on his part, he confuses the single interrogation which strikes us as pertinent (strikes me in particular) and which concerns him directly: would not the disenchanted young widow remind him of another feminine presence, eternally hovering over his narrative and touching him very closely? Doesn’t the description he gives of her face, with its firm features, seem to relate directly to a photograph of his own mother when the latter was thirty, an image to which he has frequently alluded? Yet he carefully avoids any mention of a resemblance, however incontestable (accentuated further by the affecting sonority of the voice which he has described elsewhere), while he profits by the slightest occasion, throughout his text, to indicate the possibly imaginary similarities or duplications—unconvincing in any case and considerably removed from one another in time. On the other hand, he insists quite freely (and in a doubtless premeditated fashion) on the sexual aura of Jo Kast as well as of the scandalous adolescent with golden curls, though the morphological comparison he establishes between mother and daughter strikes us, once more, as quite subjective, not to say marked by a mendacious intention.
Dany von Brücke’s “natural” daughter is much more likely to be the image of the “Aryan” beauty of her male progenitor who, while denying her his noble ancestral title, has nonetheless decked her out in an archaic and virtually extinct Prussian given name: Gegenecke, swiftly transformed into Gege—i.e., Guégué according to the German pronunciation, but Gallicized as Gigi and then turned into Djidji for the Americans. In passing I remark, for those who might not yet have understood, that this capricious young creature, so remarkable for her precocity in several realms, is one of the chief agents of our tactical forces.
* * *
Emerging finally from his reverie (after how long an interval?), the traveler brings his eyes back to the lady.… He realizes with some surprise that the armchair in which she was sitting a few moments before is now empty. And, turning in his seat, he fails to find her in any other point of the huge room. The hostess would thus have left the salon with its erotic dolls and abandoned her visitor without allowing him to detect any sound of her footsteps or the slightest creak of the parquet floor or a grating of a door hinge. Why has she suddenly left the room so secretly? Might she have run to tell Pierre Garin that the migratory bird is now caught in the meshes of his net? Would the DAS men already be there in the villa, where an alarming disturbance is audible upstairs? But now at this very moment the ineffable widow with green eyes, assuaged by mendacious languors, discreetly returns to the salon/shop by some imperceptible entrance, located somewhere in the depths of a room so dark that the young woman seems to be emerging out of the shadows, carefully carrying a saucer with a brimming cup which she is being careful not to spill. While keeping a watchful eye on the level of the liquid, she approaches with a dancer’s immaterial step, saying: “I’ve fixed you a cup of coffee, Monsieur Wallon, nice and strong, the way the Italians make it.… A little bitter, but still, I’m sure you’ve never tasted anything nearly so good in the Communist zone. Here, thanks to the United States Quartermaster Corps, we have the advantage of certain hard-to-get products. [She puts her precious gift between his hands.] It’s robusta from Colombia. …” And after a silence, while he begins to sip the scorching black infusion, she adds in a more intimate, maternal tone of voice: “You’re so tired, my poor Boris, that you went to sleep while I was talking!”
The drink is indeed so strong that it’s a little nauseating; it’s certainly not what’s called a café américain.… Having nonetheless managed to swallow it, the traveler feels no better—rather, the contrary. In order to stem his growing nausea, he gets up from his chair, leaving his empty cup on the marble top of an end table already overloaded with small objects: purses of metallic mesh, flowers made of beads, hat pins, mother-of-pearl boxes, exotic seashells … in front of several family photographs of various sizes, clustered diagonally in perforated brass frames. In the center, the largest of these shows a vacation scene at the seashore, with great rounded boulders on the left side, and far in the background, glistening little waves; in front of all this, four persons are standing on the sand, lined up facing the camera. The shot might just as well have been taken on a little Breton beach around León.
The two central figures of this image share the same Nordic blondness: a tall thin man with a handsome, severe face, at least fifty years old, wearing impeccable white trousers and a close-fitting white shirt buttoned up to the neck, and to his right a very little girl of perhaps a year and a half, two at the most, smiling winsomely, completely naked.
On each side of this pair—that is, at each end of the row—are standing two persons remarkable for their black heads of hair: a very pretty woman (of about twenty) who is holding a child by the hand and, on the other side, a man of thirty or thirty-five. Both are wearing black bathing suits (or at least dark enough to look black in a black-and-white photograph), covering the entire body in the first instance, but only the lower half of the body in the second, both persons still wet, apparently from a recent dip. Judging by their ages, these two very brown adults must be the parents of the little girl with wheat-colored curls, who has apprently received her grandfather’s pale pigmentation as a Mendelian inheritance.
The latter, for the moment, is staring up, toward the edge of the shiny rectangle, at a flight of seabirds—shrieking gulls, black-headed terns, petrels returning to the open sea—or else at planes that are passing overhead outside the field of vision. The younger man is watching the little girl, who in her left hand is offering the photographer one of those tiny crabs, called “green crabs,” so common on these beaches, which she is holding between two fingers by a hind leg, studying her catch with an amazed expression. Only the young mother Anadyomene is looking in the direction of the camera, posing with a lovely smile for the occasion. But, attracting more attention, clearly visible at the center of the image, the crab’s two wide-open pincers and eight slender legs are spread out in a stiff fan, quite regularly spaced and perfectly symmetrical.
In order to study more closely the different actors of this complex scene, Wall has taken the frame in both hands and brought it closer to his eyes, as if he wanted to get inside it. He seems to be on the point of jumping in when his hostess’s disturbing voice intervenes to pull him back at the last moment, murmuring just behind his ear: “That’s Gigi at two, in a sandy creek on the northeast side of Rügen in the summer of ’37, when it was unusually hot.”
“And the glorious young woman holding her hand, whose shoulders and arms are still dripping seawater?”
“That’s not the ocean, only the Baltic. And it’s me, of course! [She greets the compliment by a little throaty laugh which vanishes as it breaks gently on the wet sand.] But I’d already been married a long time when that was taken.”
“To the man who’s also just come out of the water?”
“No, no! To Daniel, the chic gentleman, the much older one who could so easily be my father.”
“Excuse me! [The polite visitor had of course recognized with no difficulty the old colonel in his statuesque pose from an allegorical statue bac
k in the square in Berlin.] Why is he looking up into the sky?”
“There was some hellish noise from a Stuka patrol—I think it was a training flight.”
“Did that have something to do with him?”
“I don’t know. But the war was coming.”
“He was very handsome.”
“Wasn’t he? A perfect specimen of a dolichocephalic blond for the zoo.”
“Who took the photograph?”
“I don’t remember.… Probably a professional, given the remarkable quality of the shot—all those tiny details; you could almost count the grains of sand.… As for the man with black hair on the far right, he’s the son Dan had from his first marriage … to abide by the convenient expression. I don’t think they were ever really married.…”
“An early affair, according to what seems the son’s maturity?”
“Dan was no more than twenty, and his ‘fiancée’ barely eighteen, my age exactly when I first met him myself.… He’s always had a great success with romantic girls.… Funny the way history repeats itself: she was French too, and according to the portraits I’ve managed to see, she looked like my twin sister, at thirty years’ distance … or maybe a little more. You could say that he had very well-established sexual tastes! But that first involvement lasted much longer than ours. ‘It was only a rehearsal,’ he used to reassure me, ‘before opening night.’ I’ve gradually come to understand, on the contrary, that I must have been only a repetition … or at best the star of some sort of ephemeral reprise of an old play.… But what’s the matter, my dear man? You seem even more exhausted than you were. You can hardly stand up—please sit down! …”
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