by Paul Griner
“My point exactly. It’s the same here. Remember, the picture starts with that buzz bomb blowing up a building, followed by a gas explosion. And those noises continue throughout the film. This is a moment she’s reasserting some power over that world. An inner silence, a moment of choice, made clear by the silent screen.”
Max bowed his head as if conquered. “All right,” he said. “One last thing. You’ve got Beethoven music in the background where she holds the umbrella open over the shorn, Mercurochromed woman. A sort of reconciliation of cultures too. But why don’t you make it so that either she or some little urchin is playing a record on a gramophone left outside in the rain? You could have the woman choose the record.”
Claus didn’t want to point out that that would be both obvious and sentimental. It had gone so well. He said, “That could work. Let me think it over.”
Max laughed. “I can see by your face you already have. Yes, well” He shrugged. “It’s your film. Do what you can. But remember.” He tapped the table with his forefinger, loud enough that the Americans looked over. “We’ve already missed the last day for requests. I can’t hold it more than another two days.”
“You’re approving it?”
“Haven’t decided.” Max closed the script up in his briefcase again. “Tell me about the final scene.”
He hadn’t said no. That was the important thing. “A fade-out from the two women with the music continuing to play, then cutting to the townspeople, recognizable now, dressed in whatever ragged finery they’ve discovered, clearing away the rubble. That, too, would be an image of reconciliation—the townspeople coming alive, as the woman choosing the dress metaphorically suggests.”
“Yes. And it’s a nice echo of the mob scene. Which is very well done, by the way. Visceral. The villagers descending on her store at night, the shouting voices, the torches.”
A tribute to his parents, even if very few people other than him would know that. He would tell Kate, of course, and he wanted to tell Max. What would it matter this late in the war? Max didn’t even know his real name.
“I should tell you about that scene,” he said, and leaned forward.
The American colonel next to them raised his voice again just then. “By July twenty-first, we’ll be out of Saint-Lô. With Operation Goodwood, I guaran-god-damn-tee it,” he said.
When he quieted down, Max turned his glance back to Claus. “Yes?” he said. “That scene?”
But the moment had passed. Bertram had found Claus this job. Was he running Max too? No, that would be impossible, but it was the kind of paranoia Bertram inspired, the kind he liked to inspire. Claus felt lucky to have one person it hadn’t touched.
“Kate,” he said, needing to say something.
“Yes. What about her?”
“She’s helped me a lot on this, given me some good ideas. I was wondering if we could use her on the film.”
“As the refugee?”
“No, of course not.” He couldn’t hesitate to turn that down; he suspected Max was hoping Alina would get the role. Her accent would be wrong, but they might be able to finesse that. “No. An unofficial adviser, that kind of thing.”
“Research, eh?” He smiled. “Well, I’ll see what the budget can take.”
“And the other night, at the theater?”
Max held up his hand. “You don’t have to explain.”
“But I want to.”
“Don’t. She’s new, you look happy.” He laughed. “Believe me, I understand. Not the time you want to spend with an old married couple.”
Claus paid the bill and Max said, “I think you’ve got the arc down here, all three acts. But sum it up for me in a single sentence that I can take to Bracken.”
Claus paused, enjoying the moment. He’d prepared for this. “Simple. This isn’t a film about a woman going back to anything, really; it’s a film about a woman who can’t go back but won’t go forward as if the past hadn’t happened.”
“Articulate today. What’s gotten into you?”
On their way out Max stopped into the clergy department and bought half a dozen collars. “To keep it open,” he said, nodding at the otherwise empty counter. He slipped his change into one of the War Comforts Fund boxes. “My small war effort.”
Really the collars were for his wife, who would hand them on to struggling Polish priests, refugees without churches, but Max would never admit it. Nor would Claus admit that that was why he’d bought the lunch.
Outside the sun was still high and very warm. They stood blinking in the light.
“Back to the MOI?” Max said. “Or off on one of your walks?”
Claus studied his watch, as if deciding. “Yes, I think so.” Whenever he was off to see Bertram, he said he needed a walk to sort things out.
“Was Griffith a walker?” Max said.
“No. He preferred being driven. A purple Mercedes, of all things.”
“Not likely either of us will get one of those. Remember,” he said before turning away. “It has to be done in two days. No extension. I can’t stretch the deadline any farther. Take time off from the Fishermen. I’ll make our excuses. The need not to disturb the workers at their work.” He waved over his shoulder and left.
The peculiar weather, warm air and sunshine after days of chilly rain. The hundreds hurrying back to work after lunch seemed either to glory in the change or to not trust it; some wore raincoats, while others were in shirtsleeves and sleeveless dresses. Claus, carrying his coat and growing hotter as he walked, fell somewhere in the middle.
Daffodils bordered the Victoria Embankment walkways, spent and hanging but buttery in the sunlight, blooming a second time in the unusual warmth. The rest of the gardens looked ragged despite the middle-aged female volunteers weeding the flowerbeds and trimming the shrubs. Elderly women watched from the remaining benches, a lucky few wearing flowered hats with exuberant roses or dangling cherries—old Victorian styles, since new hats were so hard to come by—the others with practical handmade tricorn newspaper affairs covering their gray hair.
Near Cleopatra’s Needle he came across a cluster of hatless internees, women in blue overalls picking up trash, red-faced from the sun and their exertions. This late in the war they couldn’t harm anyone, and that they were still interned angered him. A heavy-limbed one straightened and said in the Bavarian dialect of his mother, “Die Sonne ist heiβ!” and a bolt of sadness shot through him. He wanted to talk to her, to agree that the sun was hot; instead, he put his shoes up on a bench one at a time to retie them.
The heat on his temple and neck, the green-tinted summer light; in this weather his mother would have been painting her springerle cookies red, white, and blue in honor of the Fourth of July for her husband to sell in the shop; the scents of anise and almond. Baked three weeks ahead of time to season properly, his mother checking nervously until they were puffed on the top but not browned; after letting them cool on a rack, she layered them in wax paper with slices of apple to keep them soft and then tucked them in the cookie tin.
He waited but the woman didn’t speak again; she’d not seemed to notice him but she was paying particular attention now to cigarette butts and condoms clustered in the grass—both of which she picked up and pocketed with a birdlike movement of her hands, for resale, perhaps, or because she could use them in prison—and she seemed to be ignoring him on purpose; he slapped his cuffs clean and hurried on, certain he could use this scene too: women picking up trash, dragooned into the great war effort, average people caught up in something they’d had no part in bringing about. Somewhere on his heroine’s journey through France she would pass them.
The air-raid sirens started as a redheaded girl cycled past near Kingsway, the long rising and falling notes of an alert. People looked up and froze as if they’d seen Medusa. Claus joined them but saw nothing; not a cloud, not a plane, not a single flying dagger. Then the all-clear sounded and his feet became unstuck from the pavement and he walked on, sympathizing with Londoners ang
ry at the wardens; the bloody fools running the sirens couldn’t get their messages straight. Several people had turned for the tube entrance, hunting safety, but the press of humanity in such confined places nauseated him. He’d pulled bodies from Bethnal Green after the panic had crushed hundreds, and he could never forget the trampled woman and her daughter in identical pink suits in a side tunnel, the cloth quite obviously from old curtains, the mother’s hands locked over her daughter’s eyes.
A cluster of giggling Girl Scouts passed in their green uniforms, lifting his mood again, and near Bush House a French colonel stepped out from a florist and handed an older woman with a caged rabbit a bouquet of flowers. In a slim pewter vase behind him were carnations dyed black, yellow, and red—the Belgian national colors, out because of a holiday—and Claus thought of pinning them to his lapel, knowing they’d irk Bertram.
Bertram’s displeasure, so easily accomplished, would please him no end, and, his mood lifting even more, he entered the florist shop with its damp cool air and said, “These are just the thing.”
The clerk tied string around the bundle and handed it over without reply.
He understood; he was not a regular customer, she might never see him again, she was tired. It showed in her face, her listless movements, the slump of her shoulders. They were all tired. He smiled at the clerk before turning away, hoping to communicate some of his happiness.
Two steps from the shop the colonel knocked the woman and her caged rabbit to the pavement. Shocking, but Claus didn’t have time to think what it meant before a swift-moving shadow blocked the light and a wall of air smelling of earth blew him backward.
July 21
“YOUR CUP OF COFFEE against my dessert,” an unfamiliar voice said, his words followed by a peculiar clicking. At last Claus identified the sound as tumbling dice. Evidently he said something.
“What’s that?” a woman said.
He opened his eyes and his mild headache exploded into throbbing pain. It was a nurse, leaning over him, her cap a bright light. He shut his eyelids again but the pain didn’t lessen and he felt like vomiting.
“Kate?”
“That’s it,” the woman said. “Go back to sleep. We’re not ready for you yet.”
He was in a hospital then. On the inside of his eyelids, a dark double image of the nurse pulsed; he wished she would remain stationary. He shifted in the bed, though it nearly made him ill to do so, wondering why he was there. Soon he smelled soap and heard the whisper of clothes rubbing together as someone stood beside him. “Kate?” he said again.
“Sorry,” she said. “Not me you’re looking for, love.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and blinked his eyes partially open; that way they didn’t feel as if pencils were stabbing into them. Another nurse. “I must have been dreaming.”
“Let me look at you.” She turned his head. “Good. Your pupils have gone down.”
He couldn’t make out her face (it was as if he was looking through glasses smeared with Vaseline), but it wasn’t Kate; the voice too deep and the body—both of them, since there appeared to be two of her—too round. He remembered the first nurse, and something about an odd dream.
Her cool fingers gripped his wrist, his own skin felt hot. Had he been burned? “Was I in an accident?” he asked.
She waited until she was done counting before answering. “Yes,” she said, and wrote something on a chart. The pencil scratched loudly.
He watched both of her put the two charts down. “Was I in an accident?” he said.
She nodded. The movement made him nauseated, so he closed his eyes before going on. “Was I in an accident?”
The springs on the next bed creaked. “Mate, she already told you you were.” An Australian accent. “Give it a rest.”
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t worry. You’re fine. It was a flying bomb.”
“Was I. . .” Before he finished, the man in the next bed shifted again. “What happened?”
“You’ll be all right,” the nurse said. “A concussion, probably, and a few glass cuts, but it looks like nothing was broken. Lucky, really.” She patted his arm, and her shoes squeaked away over the terrazzo floor. He moved his uncomfortable arms and legs back and forth over the hot sheets, trying to find a cooler resting place.
Someone farther down the ward was moaning.
“Stop that!” a nurse’s curt voice said. Then the nurse was beside him, taking his pulse again. Why wouldn’t they leave him alone? “Was I in an accident?”
She cut her eyes to the next bed but evidently the man was sleeping. He must have slept too. The light was different, fading; earlier it had been bright. Behind the smells of bleach and sweat was a new one of institutional food; mealtime must have come and gone. From the lingering greasy odor, he hadn’t missed much. Still, what was happening to him? “Was I in an accident?” he repeated.
“Yes, a flying bomb. You won’t remember it probably. Quite an incident, really. Hit a church just behind Aldwych. Went right down into the crypt and started a fire. The old coffins. People buried for a hundred years and then they get cremated. It took a dozen fire appliances and two fire brigades an entire day to put them out.”
“A day? I’ve slept that long?”
“I wouldn’t really call it sleep, but you’ve been out for four.”
He couldn’t recall any of it, yet the lightness of her tone meant she was trying to divert his attention. Not from his own wounds, as they seemed mostly superficial, but from the carnage caused by the bomb. Deflections and jokes indicated something serious.
He closed his eyes to make it seem that he was sleeping, though he doubted he could fool her. Kate had told him of trying to take one patient’s pulse and getting none, only to look up and see the man smiling; somehow he’d learned how to stop blood flow to his arm. Then a memory startled him: a wall of air sending him flying. He gripped the sheets to keep from falling and only when he was certain that he wasn’t did he relax his fingers. The nurse was there. Still, or again?
He reached out for her hand. “How many died?”
“I don’t know.”
He squeezed, hard enough that her face changed. He hadn’t meant that and relaxed his grip. “Please.”
She looked down the ward, then leaned toward him, close enough that he made out the soft blond hairs on her cheek.
“Officially, near a hundred.” Her voice was just above a whisper. “But I’ve heard rumors that it might be as many as three or four.”
He released her hand and shut his eyes. “Thank you.” It calmed him to know the scope of the disaster. What he imagined was always worse.
He’d slept and his skin felt sticky; he hoped it would soon be time for a bath. Someone was sitting beside the bed. Bent head, dark hair, his part a deep white furrow so straight it looked surveyed; at the very end it took a jagged turn. He spun his hat by the brim, the gesture Claus knew him by.
“Max,” he said.
Max lifted his head and smiled.
“The script.”
Max let go of the hat with one hand, showing his pale pink palm, before putting it back. “Oh, the script,” he said. “You mustn’t worry about that.”
Claus slept again. Now the ward was hot and dark and smelled of disinfectant and, faintly, of burned flesh; the man to his left, probably, a new patient with a screen around his bed. No chair. Had he dreamed Max? On the other side was the Australian, a bluff fellow who gambled with a partner in the bed beyond, whom Claus had yet to see as lifting his head hurt, though he was used now to their wagers. Every meal had been parceled up and the coffee was evidently quite good. It went for more than just about anything, though spoons seemed hard to come by.
Twice he’d started books on the bedside table but the print was cruelly small and deciphering it gave him a headache. Gambling was out—he couldn’t concentrate and the rattling dice irritated him—so his only entertainment was trying to discern patterns in the vaulted ceiling’s cracked plaster or lying very still a
nd listening to the various steps coming down the ward and guessing who they might belong to, male or female, nurse or doctor, visitor or ambulatory patient. Now there were two sets, one of an orderly mopping the central passageway and that of a woman with a purposeful stride. He made out her dark shoeprints on the recently polished floor and was surprised when she stopped before him.
“Myra!”
“Charles. We worried you’d died in the blast.” She stood at the end of his bed, purse clutched in both gloved hands, pearls glowing at her throat.
He tried to make a joke. “That why you got dressed for a funeral?”
“No.” She shook her head, the smallest of motions, the cherries on her hat clicking together. “Bad news, I’m afraid.”
He resisted the urge to sit up. From the level of sorrow in her face, he tried to gauge whom it concerned. “Someone from the post?”
“No. Well, not that. I mean, that isn’t what I came to tell you—in fact, I didn’t come to tell you anything, rather to see you, though Herbert was hurt.”
“Badly?”
She shrugged. “In his mind, certainly. A blast loosened his teeth. He’ll have to get them all pulled now, poor fellow.”
Herbert was unduly proud of his large, even teeth but Myra had never liked him, and it was an accomplishment for her to extend him sympathy. She was wearing her perfume again. It seemed overly strong and, peculiarly, to be growing stronger. At least she wasn’t standing directly beside him; he didn’t think his nose could take it. He closed his eyes and tried to think of something else.
She cleared her throat. “But I should tell you this. Madge.”
“No.” His eyes blinked open and he tried to sit up.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
The bright smile, the endless mock-cynical humor. Bertram’s office would never again run so smoothly. He lifted a hand and let it fall back on the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said.