by Paul Griner
“Getting the trains shouldn’t be hard,” Claus said. “We won’t need them for more than an hour or two. They’re stuck in the yards all the time.”
“Still, this second act.” Max waved his hand over the script. “It feels thin. The real problem is your heroine. Jeanne. We don’t know enough about her yet, haven’t seen her make enough choices.”
Claus squeezed his fingers together because closing his eyes and moving his lips in silent prayer would look foolish. Please, he thought. His fingers began to tingle.
“And how does the dress scene fit in with this?” Max said. “How does she even get to the town?”
“Car. Horse cart. On foot.”
“A journey, back through modes of transport, and therefore back in time.”
“Exactly”
Max swiveled in his creaking chair again, pencil at his lips. “And the third act?” Max said. “It’s hardly as subtle as the rest of this”
In it, the townspeople emerge from the basements and barns they’ve been sheltering in, see the newly stocked food store, and rush inside. Understandable, given their long years of privation, but also ultimately self-destructive, as a stray bomb then hits the food store, killing many. Jeanne, who enters the dress shop, is safe.
“The bombing is accidental,” Max said. “Which isn’t satisfying, emotionally or dramatically. The bomb could as easily hit one store as the other.”
Claus saw that Max was right, but he was certain that the scene had to stay, altered somehow but unchanged in its essentials. “Yes,” he said. “It has to be better. Work with me. We can get it right.”
“And the specific scenes themselves?”
The crucial moment. Claus was ready for it. He looked at Max steadily. “I’ll have them soon.”
“You need them now. I need them, to have a clearer idea of where the film is going, its final arc. That’s not clear yet. You can’t sum it up for me in a single line, can you?”
Claus shook his head.
“I don’t see how I can approve it without knowing those things”
Claus felt all his enthusiasm draining away. In an outer office a teakettle began to boil just as the air-raid sirens started. He could use that, he thought, perking up again, the conflation of war and domesticity, the very problem his heroine faced. Images began to fill his head, Jeanne in a kitchen moving a boiling kettle off the fire, realizing as it stopped whistling that the air-raid sirens were sounding. For the first time he had a face for Jeanne: Kate Zweig’s.
Max was studying him. He shook a cigarette free from a pack and offered it to Claus, who declined, and Max lit his cigarette and closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Though Claus welcomed the scent of smoke—the former labs still smelled of formaldehyde, and the stagnant air sometimes gave Claus headaches—the closed eyes were a bad sign. It was Max’s signature move before he turned something down. “What worries me is that you’ve got only three weeks. If Bracken is to approve this, we have to complete the script by then.” He opened his eyes and touched a date circled on the calendar, July 14. “War’s coming to an end sometime, and our funds will dry up first. Three weeks,” he repeated. “That’s when they’ve said our requests are due.”
“What if it takes longer?”
Max shrugged and blew out a stream of smoke, watched it drift to the cloud hovering under the ceiling. Claus laughed at the gesture’s theatricality and Max smiled, which meant that he was signing off on the idea. It was a stunning reversal. Had he intuited Claus’s excitement, his belief in the film’s possibilities? Claus felt a sudden elation and tried to keep from showing it.
“Here,” Max said, sitting forward. He flipped the script and scribbled notes on the back page. “The way you’ve got it now, with the stores next to each other, cutting from a camera in one store to a camera in the next, that won’t work.”
“The close-ups and cutbacks clarify her emotions and move the plot along.”
“Yes, but if you have the stores on opposite sides of the street, with her standing between them, the metaphoric choice will be clearer.”
Claus visualized the scene instantly. “Yes,” he said, standing and gathering up the script. “And if the grocer’s camera is mounted high, the food will seem to press down on her. Then we’d shoot from inside the dress shop at a low angle, making her eyes go up to the dress. Very good.” He was set now, he had it; he wanted to go before Max made him lose his train of thought.
“One last thing, Charles,” he said.
“Yes?” He made himself linger.
“You want audiences to feel, not think.”
“No,” he said, backing out the door. “I want to make them feel and think.”
“Well, think about this,” Max called after him, loud enough for Claus to hear over his echoing footsteps. “The woman’s name is too plain. Change it from Jeanne.”
Claus finished his notes about camera angles and crosscuts and added a few details to the suitcase scene: stickers from various colonial ports on the suitcases, the man checking the African carvings he’d stuffed inside, which he was reluctant to give up because they were valuable. Then he sat back. He wanted to do more—Max’s objections were legitimate—but it seemed impossible; the MOI building’s heat, his closing eyes, the mistakes he kept making on the typewriter. The buzz bombs were coming over more heavily after dark, killing people in their beds and depriving survivors of sleep, and he’d spent the previous three nights at the post, napping for an hour, wondering if any of the explosions were anywhere near Kate Zweig. Myra, the post leader, hadn’t slept at all.
His vision began to blur and images from his past came to mind: his father, and his father’s store. It made sense, he thought, lazily watching them unfold, wartime and its confusion, though these scenes were from a war’s beginning rather than its end and their sweep was toward disaster, not triumph.
Red letters arcing across a store window spelled out KRAUT AND FRANKFURTERS, then the window was smashed as a crowd roared its approval, and a man’s pale face hovered inside. His father. When the United States had gone to war against Germany in 1917, a competing storeowner had put all his German items in the street and invited townspeople to burn them. Food, fabric, books. He’d given out free paint and asked the assembled mob to paint over his window signs: KRAUT, HAMBURGERS, FRANKFURTERS. When they were done he stood on the porch and looked at Claus’s father’s store. “Well, Declan? How about you?”
Claus’s father had said, “Most of the customers that have made you rich are German. Our wives are. What’s changed about that?”
“The war. It changes everything.”
“It changes nothing, William. Unless you let it.”
In the morning his storefront window had been shattered. He restored the window, prudently not repainting any German words on the glass, but that hadn’t stopped people from smashing it two more times or a mob from coming to his house at three in the morning weeks later, demanding that he sign up for thousands of dollars in war bonds. Bobbing torches in the dark, confused shouting, trash-can lids banging together.
Declan had tried to find out who was outside and someone had yelled, “The Americanization Committee! You have to open up. It’s the law!”
It wasn’t the law, but Declan had recognized William’s voice among the others, and both times after his store had been damaged, William’s boys had helped clean it up. He came out and two men pulled his arms behind him and bound them with rope; another punched him in the stomach. On his knees, he couldn’t protect himself, and several men began battering his face. Claus could almost feel the blows as he imagined it.
“Hold on there, now!” William had said. “You’re going too far!”
Eventually William had freed him and convinced the others to wait outside while he cleaned Declan up, telling Hettie that she should stay upstairs.
“The crowd might not take kindly to a German accent right now.”
“They can take kindly to a frying pan if they try to come in,” she’
d said.
William had ignored her and tried to get Declan to buy bonds.
“I already bought seven hundred dollars’ worth,” Declan had said, wiping his bloody face with a damp blue rag. “More than anyone else in the summer drive. I’m not buying a single cent.”
“But you have to! They’ll burn the house!”
“Not now. Not after that. Not ever.”
William had argued for over an hour, putting the mob off again and again, finally telling them something that made them cheer and disperse, and when Declan’s name appeared on the fall bond-drive list for a thousand dollars, Declan was sure William had paid it himself, guilty over his role in the affair and his own continued success. He was still selling frankfurters and hamburgers and kraut, though under the names of hot dogs, liberty sandwiches, and liberty cabbage, while Declan’s store had gone out of business. To the end Declan had put out free German pretzels, something that incensed the townspeople. Even his wife urged him to stop. You’re not even German! But he wouldn’t listen.
Claus was still unsure if his father had been courageous or foolish, especially with a son in jail on charges of treason, but that the scene had come to him so vividly meant something for his current project. Generally he didn’t linger on his personal history—it made him bitter—but his mind had turned to it of its own accord, so he wrote the scene out longhand and added notes to himself on how he might use it, then closed the file and stood, thinking that a bit of fresh air might revive him.
His footsteps sounded loud in the deserted hallway. At Max’s door he cleared his throat. “Fancy a bite to eat or a cuppa?” Whenever he wanted to be ingratiating, he dropped in Anglicisms, hoping they didn’t sound as false as they felt.
Max shook his head without raising it. “Sorry. Production schedules. Bracken wants them tomorrow and I’m behind.” He began to whistle, to show he wasn’t angry at Claus’s part in the delay.
“Sorry to hear that,” Claus said. He was. He felt a piercing desire for human contact, as he often did after writing. It wouldn’t come from Max, so there was no sense lingering. “Another time then,” he said.
Outside it was warm and windy, a welcome change from the long cold spell. Dust in the blue sky, but no smoke; at least the buzz bombs didn’t often start fires. Still, the air around the massive, derelict wing of the British Museum smelled charred, a remnant of the Blitz, and he relegated it to the back of his mind through an old trick, imagining that someday he might film it.
June 25
THE STREETS WEREN’T as crowded as he’d expected and as the warm windy air usually conjured, but even so there was an early-evening bustle once he left behind the residential squares of Bloomsbury, with their converted front-yard vegetable gardens and their window-box tomatoes. At Oxford Street a policeman was lowering the traffic-light shutters with a long pole, a difficult job made more difficult by the wind, and on the far side a queue of women waited patiently outside a shoe shop, a few glancing nervously skyward, where hundreds of yards up a trio of barrage balloons nosed into the wind, pink and silver in the fading blue light, quivering like trout in a stream.
A chalked sign said that several dozen pairs of shoes remained and that the store would stay open until all shoppers had had their chance or the shoes were gone, but from the look of the line it would be the latter. They’d do better with Herbert, Claus’s fellow warden who was able to get almost any kind of shoes, though boots were a dicier proposition. To cut down on pilfering, the government shipped left and right ones separately, and sometimes when you got one you had to wait months for its mate. An unmatched left one stood stiffly in Claus’s closet.
London had turned surly again, and most of the people he passed, Soho-bound, grim, and quiet, seemed off for a quick bite before heading to the shelters. Though he wanted company he tended to avoid Soho, not because it was a bit seedy and a lot damaged but because so many other MOI writers clogged its cheap restaurants and grubby pubs. He preferred the military clubs around Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus. Your own kind, Max had once said. Americans.
It wasn’t the Americans that attracted Claus, it was the military news he could gather and the chance to be around strangers. If he had to lie about his past, and Bertram insisted on it, better to do so with people he didn’t know. Best of all would be to do it with the one interesting stranger he’d met recently, but finding Kate Zweig was next to impossible. Too many nurses in too many hospitals; he’d raise suspicions trying to track her down.
He contemplated going home, but what would he do there other than sleep or endure the agonizing routine of composing letters? Besides, Berlin might get suspicious if he wrote at unscheduled times; the Germans loved routine. His mother had made it easy to understand what the Germans wanted. From order, all good things flow. Was he betraying her memory? No. She’d have wanted him to do it, seeing what Germany had become.
Outside the Whitehall Theatre, a slender woman apologized for bumping into him and then asked for a light in a thick Continental accent. Not a prostitute; the skirt pressed against her legs was good and her hair its natural chestnut color, and she hadn’t propositioned him. Want some love, dearie? Yet she cupped his hand with hers and leaned toward his lighter, her touch lingering.
“If you’ve a few spare petrol coupons, we could have both of us a good time.”
He hesitated, blushing—he didn’t like being so badly wrong—and she smiled encouragingly, taking his hesitation for an invitation; he couldn’t look her in the eye when he spoke again. “Sorry.” He nodded at the ballroom behind her, Cupid’s Arrow. “I’m to meet someone at the club.”
Her mild, inoffensive face grew angry and, angry, was suddenly ugly, the nose too long, the brown eyes too small and close together. “This I will just bet,” she said, and blew smoke at him. A dozen yards farther on she turned to watch him, arms crossed, standing near a pile of orange peels outside a milk bar.
Now he was committed to Cupid’s Arrow, a frequent destination though not one he’d been thinking of tonight, and he foresaw his entire evening: he’d pick out a likely hostess, lonely and hanging back in the corner, and dance twice with her before chatting her up, laying his accent on thick. She’d tell him that she liked Americans, and that she’d danced with a lot of them recently, and from there, getting information would be simple. I have a buddy in the Third Army. He said he’d danced with the prettiest girl here at the end of May. That must be you.
She’d laugh, nod. The Third Army had been on leave just before the invasion and now was nowhere to be seen. Normandy, then; the Germans would already know, but confirming their knowledge made each of his lies more believable. He pulled the door open, not easy to do against the wind, and went in.
He grabbed a beer and a sandwich before moving to the dance floor. The beer was warm and surprisingly good, the sandwich nearly inedible: austerity bread, watercress, and clumped, oily fish that passed for herring; he ate while looking over the program, hoping to be distracted. The Skyliners were up in an hour and until then Paula Schreffrette was spinning records, Vera Lynn and not Bing Crosby, as would be the case in the American clubs.
He had found his taste changing over the past decade; now he preferred the subtler, less-brassy English sound to the all-out assault of an American band, and he felt himself relax as he ate and drank. At the click of billiard balls he closed his eyes to listen and heard also the tick tock tick of table tennis from the side rooms and the echoing voices from the tiled showers, but he was jolted back to full consciousness by a rousing female laugh from the dance floor. It came again, twice, and after finishing his beer, he went to investigate.
Two hostesses were dancing together by the bandstand, a relaxed slow shuffle, while a few others spun around the dull floor with dull civilians, but most milled by the entrances, awaiting a larger crowd. At a nearby table were two women, the younger, blond and stolid, leaning forward in her chair and listening intently to the other, who was in her late forties and well dressed. His puls
e quickened at her black hair, which reminded him of Kate Zweig’s, down to the one gray stripe at the temple.
As the stolid girl tilted her head back and laughed uproariously, holding her hand in front of her mouth so that the laughter looked forced but sounded genuine, the second woman reached for her drink, and he was stunned to see that it was Kate. He crossed immediately to stand before her and only when she looked up expectantly, composed but smiling, did he realize what he’d done.
“Hello,” she said.
Claus took her offered hand, feeling himself blush, and said hello.
“This is an unexpected pleasure,” Kate said. She waited, but when he didn’t respond, she added, “My name is Kate. Remember?”
“Yes, of course.” His face grew hotter. “Kate Zweig. And I’m Charles Murphy.”
“Oh, good.” She took her hand back but continued to tease. “You haven’t changed your name either.”
Now he felt himself burning. There was nothing to do but turn and smile at the younger woman. “And you are?”
“Greta Andrus.” She spoke with an unmistakable German accent.
Kate touched Greta’s shoulder. “A probationary nurse. She’s not had fun in ages, so I made her come out with me.” She leaned forward and, just above a whisper but recklessly nonetheless, spoke to Greta in German. “Er ist der, von dem ich Ihnen erzählte.” He’s the one I told you about.
Claus’s scalp prickled. He couldn’t let on that he understood, though he was pleased she’d mentioned him; it was awkward being in public with German speakers. People were denounced for less. Kate looked up. “Won’t you dance with her?”
“Of course.” He held his hand out to Greta. “May I?”
“Please,” she said. “This, I would to enjoy.”
He led her onto the floor. Judging by her awkward carriage and heavy frame he would have guessed she’d be ungraceful, but she was a surprisingly fluid dancer, responding to his slightest touch. Still, he didn’t hold her close—her perfume was almost acrid—and it was all he could do to keep himself from looking over her shoulder at Kate.