by Paul Griner
“Well,” he said, stubbornly returning to his point. “Perhaps we wouldn’t be worrying about slaughter if the Germans hadn’t been foolish enough to elect Hitler.”
“Hitler is evil. No rational being would argue that. But rational Germans supported him because they starved under the republic, thanks to the French and the Poles and the English. Even the English soldiers were appalled by what the postwar blockade did. This bombing is atrocious, but it was the English who brought war to civilians, not the Germans. How many have died here from the bombing this time around? Forty thousand? Fifty? Every one of those deaths is unjustified, but eight hundred thousand Germans died during the last war from starvation.”
“Terrible. But didn’t their kaiser have some responsibility for that?”
“Of course. But what responsibility did he have for continuing the blockade a year after he’d abdicated and the war had ended? Another half million died then. After, not during, and every one of them due to the blockade. The English wanted to ensure that the Germans would sign any peace agreement, no matter how brutal, if only to end their starvation, and you Americans didn’t stop them. You’ll notice too that the kaiser did none of the suffering, whiling away his time in a Dutch castle.”
He let the comment about Americans go; his lineage was too complicated to explain. But he wanted to sting her too. “You seem to have escaped the suffering,” he said.
Her face changed. “You’re quite wrong there. I survived, but I never escaped.”
For the next block they were silent. He’d have to let her go soon if he couldn’t prolong their conversation.
“So you don’t think anything in the war is justified?” he said at last. “You think it’s wrong to kill Nazis?”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? To kill Nazis you must kill Germans too. That the war is justified doesn’t justify everything in it. Civilian slaughter. That’s the sticking point.”
The rain had brought out the faded, painted ads on the sides of brick buildings below Oxford Street: Teller Pianos, Prince Powders, the Barbee Company, remnants of the not-too-distant past. Beyond the last they had a sudden vista of low mounded ruins and cleared lots, as if a madman had got loose with a bulldozer and knocked down six blocks’ worth of buildings for a better view. Claus contemplated it silently as they walked, the exposure of a deeper past, foundations of the earliest churches, buried walls and Roman baths, ancient wells. They were moving backward in time; soon they’d all be carrying clubs.
She’d been watching him. “You see,” she said. “It bothers you too. Can you tell me that if you knew where a single bomb was going to land, you wouldn’t do everything in your power to stop it?”
“I would. But I can’t. None of us can.” He could, he might, but he certainly couldn’t tell her that. Still, it was an odd coincidence that she brought it up just then.
At Orchard Street they waited for traffic to thin, and he studied their reflection in a chemist’s window by force of habit. No one seemed to be watching them, none of the women, a few of them tarts, nor the lone man, a thin small fellow with orange freckles, bad skin, and a prominent Adam’s apple like a partially swallowed brick. His clothes looked too big for him. They’d overtaken him on Oxford Street and he was still with them, but he seemed besotted by the tarts. Claus himself looked like a schoolboy with his hands stuffed in his pockets, so he took them out, but then he didn’t know what to do with them and stuffed them back in again. The whole thing was like a Fritz Lang scene, his trademark camera angles from inside store windows: the silent, surging crowd, and the two of them the odd note in the composition. The audience would understand their connection immediately, on an emotional level; he wondered if she did.
“You’re a very fine speaker,” he said, “though I don’t think you quite fit the country’s mood. And I wonder. At this point, do you really think the Germans even remember what the English did in the last war?”
“History has a long memory,” she said. “When I was in France, and the English began bombing French towns, the local French gossip was that the British were systematically destroying all the towns through which Joan of Arc had marched. And that was five hundred years ago.”
The orange-freckled boy peeled off, following a tart.
“France?” Claus said. “It couldn’t have been easy getting out of there.”
“It wasn’t”
“And yet you did. Somehow, I’m not surprised.” She didn’t respond, which was a surprise. More surprising still was how much he wanted her to, but nothing he said seemed to reach her; it was like talking to an egg. “You know, this is all rather ridiculous. Arguing when we don’t even know each other. Perhaps I should introduce myself. Charles Murphy.” He gave a mock bow, which caused the corners of her mouth to turn up. Not quite a smile, but a start.
“Charmed, I’m sure.”
Abruptly, he decided to try another tack. “For what it’s worth, I understand.”
“Yes? Understand what?”
“Everybody lost someone—or something—in the last war. Myself included.” And he had: his citizenship, his parents, and, for nearly a decade, his freedom.
She stood straighter, her manner suddenly chillier. “It wasn’t the war,” she said, “it was in the peace that followed that I lost something. An English peace.”
“So you’ve said. But you know, you really should be careful. You’ll get yourself arrested if you anger the wrong people with your anti-English sentiments.”
“Feelings you yourself must hold or harbor. Otherwise, you’d arrest me. You’re in uniform, after all.”
“Not police.”
“Military should be enough to do the trick.”
“Mock military, I’m afraid. I only look official. Ministry of Information.”
“Ah, that explains it then,” she said, striding a bit more quickly.
“Explains what?”
“Why you’re so poorly informed.”
He laughed for what seemed like the first time in months. “Please,” he said, moving to keep up with her long rapid strides. “Could I know your name?”
“Planning to turn me in after all, are you?”
“No. Hoping to get to know you.”
“Tell me,” she said, ignoring his last words. “Why is an American working for the Ministry of Information?”
“Oh, it’s not unusual. Most of my colleagues are foreign. French, Poles, Russians, Serbs. We’re quite a mixed lot. Filmmakers tend to be.”
She turned up the underside of her forearm and looked at her watch. “Intriguing. Films during wartime. Important work, no doubt. But I was asking about you, not them.”
He felt his ears redden at the subtle rebuke. “It’s a long story.”
“And an interesting one, I’m sure,” she said over the diesel rattling of an oncoming maroon double-decker. From Glasgow, one of the dozens brought in to replace the destroyed London buses; the V-1s seemed to have a special affinity for their depots.
As it passed she smiled, which pleased him, since it robbed her words of their sting and was the first sign that she might actually be enjoying his company, but before he could respond she went on. “Which I really would like to hear, though I’m afraid I don’t have time to, today.” She tapped her watch and strode into the street. “I’m past due.”
He couldn’t think of a suitable reply in time to stop her, and hurrying after her would seem ridiculous, yet he felt terrible watching her go, almost bereft. She was a nurse, but beyond that he knew nothing. How on earth would he ever see her again?
On the far curb she turned to face him. “Kate Zweig,” she called out. Another bus was coming, and he was going to ask which hospital she worked at, but by the time it passed she’d disappeared down the dark narrow entrance to the tube.
June 23
MAX STARED AT Claus’s palm. “Been writing on yourself again?”
A series of faded blue marks. Claus remembered the chemist’s window, jamming his hands in his pocke
ts; he hadn’t looked at them in the intervening two days. When would he have had the time? Work, endless shifts as a warden, a long series of letters, daydreams of Kate Zweig.
“You’re blushing!” Max said. Claus blushed harder. “What’s this about, then?”
“An uncapped pen in my pocket.”
“Really? And why were you fondling it?”
He changed the subject but Max wouldn’t let go and finally Claus laughed—the toll he had to pay to move on—and Max tapped the script with his folded glasses. “I agreed to three lines for the film,” he said. “You’ve only taken care of two.”
A terrible sign, the joking, the sudden switch; Max’s moves were predictable, and this combination usually meant rejection. Claus began to sweat.
Max’s instructions had been simple: A refugee making her way back to her village near war’s end, passing through Allied lines into an indeterminate zone, perhaps even beyond the front. The scenario was to be dramatic. After various travails, all her choices, she would return home successfully, would triumph. The Refugee’s Return. The request had come down from very high up, Max had told him. “They want something to show in recently liberated France. A rush job. My suspicion is they’ll forget about it as soon as we turn something in. Don’t spend a lot of time on it.”
But Claus had, and it was not something he was willing to let go. “Which one am I missing?” He moved a beaker from a chair and sat. Before the war, the MOI building had housed London University’s biology department, Max’s office a lab, and it seemed permanently to tremble on the brink of reversion; swarms of beakers and test tubes, racks of Bunsen burners, stacked slides on a counter. Especially unsettling were the pale bloated jarred specimens floating in formaldehyde on shelves behind Max’s head.
“The second part,” Max said. “There’s no drama here, no spectacle. It’s what they’re going to want. These people have lived through years of privation and dread.”
Claus was certain that the film wouldn’t have any value if the French found it sensational or sentimental. “They’ve had enough spectacle,” he said. “And trying to guess what they want is a mistake. Griffith did that in Hearts of the World and regretted the film the rest of his life.”
“Yes, and he gave people what was good for them in Isn’t Life Wonderful and no one watched it.”
“Max, these people need to figure out how to lead normal lives again.”
“They’ll never lead normal lives. Not after what they’ve been through” Max drummed his fingers on the desk and sat back. “They need to forget their past, not be reminded of it. They want to be amused and entertained.”
Claus couldn’t afford to seem dismissive; without Max’s backing, the project had no chance. He knew his idea was good if not yet fully formed, he just had to convince Max of that, get Max to support him while he finished it, and keep Max from ruining it as he did. It was better to let Max take the lead, so he ducked his head and pretended he was listening to the raised voices from down the hall; the Polish section. Why did they always seem to be yelling? The scent of his sweat was overpowering.
At last Max put his glasses on and bent over the pages so closely that the glasses seemed a prop. “It’s propaganda, Charles, but it doesn’t have to be dull. This scene with the dress. What’s that about?”
One of the first scenes to come to Claus, it featured a woman standing outside two stores in a recently liberated French town—so recently that the Germanized store names hadn’t been returned to their original French—her head swiveling from one display window to the other. In the first, newly abundant food supplies were piled on slanting tables: cheeses and meats, plump pears and ripe tomatoes, glossy onions and swollen peppers; the other store featured a single beautiful silk dress with large white flowers on a bright background. Which would she choose? To Claus it was obvious. No one could resist a bit of color after five years of war. Max had blue-penciled it and written What about the café? in the margin.
“Did you show the scene to Alina?” Claus asked.
Max’s wife, a Polish refugee he’d married a year into the war; Claus owed the scene’s genesis to her. At a recent party she’d seemed drunk—red eyes and slurred speech—but had only been horribly sad. The Germans had killed her brothers and the Russians her father, and the party had fallen on one brother’s birthday. She’d worn what looked like a brand-new dress—peacock blue with a plunging neckline—stored, obviously, and brought out for the occasion. Alina would have chosen the new dress.
“No need to,” Max said. “I was sure it was boring.”
“It’s not boring. She’s presented with a choice. It’s the second turning point, the scene that sets up the entire third act.”
“That’s not a choice that matters. In my version, the café’s customers are cowardly or brave, and she chooses which side she’ll join, but your version has a woman wondering about food or a dress. Who wouldn’t pick the food? She’s hungry.”
“And she’ll be hungry the next day too. But she wants something that shows the horror of the lean years is over.”
Max’s original brief had been that higher-ups were thinking of a film about the difficulties that those living in formerly occupied lands faced when they reentered a life of freedom and personal choice. “It’s distasteful, really,” he’d said when he’d first brought it up. “They want us to mint coins from people’s suffering.”
But Claus had been hoping to make a real film since the beginning of his time at the MOI, and scenes had sprung instantly to mind, bits of action, visuals as precise as a Modotti or a Lang, and he’d pushed for the film. “It won’t be using their suffering, it will help them move beyond it.”
Eventually, after much pleading, Claus had gotten Max to agree to his suggestion of a refugee, the barest outline of her story, perhaps because of Alina. And perhaps Max didn’t like what Claus thought would occur. But Claus’s enthusiasm for the film was tied up with his hopes for it. If in America he was infamous and untouchable, here he’d been known, if at all, as a maker of industrial films. Still would be if the war hadn’t come, though until now none of the documentaries he’d made for the MOI—about germs, about the need to save scrap metal, about the lives of ordinary working people during the war, for which he’d leaned heavily on Winifred’s experiences—had any but local value, and he was looking forward to something more at last. Sooner or later the world would have had enough of destruction, and he wanted a film that would give him work once that happened. He paused, trying to figure out how to convey all of that without giving himself away.
Max said, “Just put the café scene in. It’s what the film needs.”
It was a horrible, over-the-top scene, featuring boisterous Frenchmen conversing in a café until two German officers arrived, at which point several men placed their watches face-up on the table, determined to stay not a second longer than the required fifteen minutes, while others bent their craven heads to cheap wine. Max had left a synopsis of this scene on Claus’s desk the week before with a note asking him to consider it, but it was completely contrary to Claus’s conception of the film. If the war was in many ways noble, at its margins it could yet be wrong, and if Claus could contribute anything, it would be that small note of reason.
During the last war, hundreds of anti-German films had been screened in the United States. Worst of all was To Hell with the Kaiser, in which German soldiers gleefully bayoneted ten-year-old children or smashed housefuls of French porcelain. A final scene showed dozens of German soldiers carrying something in their bloused shirts, running and laughing and jostling one another for the privilege of being the first to dump their take—French eyeballs—into a bathtub. Claus wanted nothing of the sort. He was half German, for God’s sake. There shouldn’t be any Germans in this film at all.
“But this scene with her looking at the dress is crucial,” he said. “It grows out of the first reversal, at the end of act one. The luggage.”
“How?”
“Metaphori
cally. Luggage, clothes.” He flipped back to the luggage scene, where in the margin he found Good written in red pencil in a tiny, feminine hand. “Someone liked it.”
“Alina,” Max said.
“You don’t?”
“That’s the thing,” Max said. He swiveled in his creaking chair and removed his glasses. “Actually, I do.”
Claus felt the first glimmer of hope, but quickly squashed it. Max could approve of dozens of scenes and still turn the project down; his likes were only part of the process.
This scene featured a man standing on the platform between two uncoupled train cars; a woman on the one that was moving away implored him to jump. Glancing at the battered, rope-bound suitcases beside him, he hesitated, reluctant to give them up. She called out again and at last he was ready to leap—too late; the gulf between the cars had grown too wide. It had a nice metaphoric specificity, Claus thought, dramatizing the past’s fateful lure.
“But trains will be impossible for us to get,” Max said, switching tactics. “They’re too busy supplying the invasion. We won’t have a chance to film it.”
Claus wouldn’t fall for that. Film people were always saying things were impossible. When he’d made Spirit of ’76, before the last war, one producer had argued that he’d never be able to shoot the winter scenes. “Washington crossing the Delaware. How are you going to do that?”
It had proved arduous but mechanically simple. Three men held the tripod legs on an ice floe and a fourth tended a fire beneath the camera to keep the camera oil from freezing. The wind, the blowing snow; he’d had to breathe on the lens every few seconds, and two cameramen had suffered frostbite while he himself had contracted pneumonia, but the scene worked. Coupling and uncoupling a train on a siding would be easy.