The Rose Café

by John Hanson Mitchell

  Earlier in the spring, when I first came out to the island with Armand and Inge, we had taken a bus from Calvi up to a little town in the central mountains called Calacuccia. A few days later we hitched a ride to Ajaccio in the bed of a truck, and on the way down we were halted en route by an immense sea of baa-ing sheep, headed up to the summer pastures.

  They were led by a ram with a bronze bell, and there were four or five dogs busily keeping the sheep together as they moved upward. Behind the dogs was a shepherd with a staff, and there were two other men on either side of the flock. In back of them were two donkeys, overloaded with baggage, and behind that there was a wagon pulled by an old nag with a white nose and suspicious eyes.

  The men were a rough-looking bunch—unshaven, dressed in many layers of ragged clothing and double-breasted suit jackets, much worn at the elbows—and although one or two of them greeted the driver of the truck, for the most part they kept their eyes on the flock and passed without so much as a word. The man in the wagon was more friendly. He wore the traditional black corduroy, and when he spotted the lovely Inge he whistled and lifted his hat as he passed, and clucked as if to say sorry, but this is the old way, this is the way it’s done, and that infernal machine of a truck will just have to wait for the sheep. Inge waved at him with both hands, fluttering her fingers.

  I had carried with me into the hills a big tranche of Pierrot’s bread, a hunk of sheep cheese, and half a bottle of a local white wine from Cap Corse, and I settled with my back to the wall and had some lunch. Then I stretched out after eating and was soon asleep—daily naps were a part of everyone’s routine at the Rose Café.

  In my sleep, I was vaguely conscious of the sound of running water and sheep bells in the distance, and when I woke, I followed the sound of the water and came to a small, bounding stream. I washed my face, drank some of the clear water, and was headed back to pick up my pack when I saw an old man with a dog making his way along the escarpment, followed by two or three belled goats. We met at the tiny stone hovel.

  He was a wiry old type, cut in the same style as Fabrizio—dressed in a corduroy suit and a dirty flannel shirt, buttoned at the neck. He wore a cloth cap and a cartridge belt, and slung over his shoulder was a long-barreled rifle. He also had a mean-looking dagger stuck inside his cummerbund.

  In spite of his fierce demeanor I did not fear for my safety when he first appeared. I had not heard of any kidnappings here on the island, and I knew also that one of the old traditions of the vendetta culture of Corsica was that strangers were out of bounds. In any case, this man was no bandit; he had kindly old eyes and smiled as he approached.

  He greeted me in dialect, and when I returned the greeting in French he switched languages, but his French was so accented, or so mixed with dialect, that I could hardly understand him. I was far from the coast at this point, several miles above Fabrizio’s compound and in a relatively remote area, so I was not surprised by his broken French. I tried Italian, he went back into dialect, and together we managed to communicate—a little.

  All I could understand was that he and his dog were searching for a lost goat. I did catch a few other phrases, alla campagna, for example, which was a local term for an outlaw, or someone who makes his living in the hills illegally. I think I also heard him say something about people who live in Bastia. The name Bastiaccio here in the interior was a derogatory term. Mountain people distrusted the Bastiese, I had heard. They were a race apart and not dependable. (Of course the Bastiese said the same thing about the mountain people—a somber, cheerless race.) I gathered that what the old man was telling me was that someone had stolen his goat. Probably a Bastiaccio.

  I offered him a little wine, which he accepted and drank in the Spanish style, holding the bottle above his open mouth and swallowing without closing his lips. Then I asked him about the little stone cabine. It was not his apparently, but was used by a shepherd who passed through this valley in summer. He told me a long story following this which was totally lost on me, although I feigned comprehension, agreeing and nodding with interest. I think it had to do with the shepherd who lived in the cabine and I think he was saying that he was not coming back this year.

  “Bene,” he said, after a few minutes. “Vadu cercare di piu questu maldettu chevre”—I’m going to search for that cursed goat, and he tipped his hat and wandered off. I watched him descend toward the stream and disappear into the thickets of holm oak and beech, the goats and the dog tagging along. He was a sprightly old man, a little like a goat himself.

  On a hunch, I calculated that if I followed the stream downhill, bushwhacking, I would come to the road I had left earlier in the day, so I followed him and then turned downhill through a relatively open stony forest. A few hundred yards downstream, I could see another clearing off to my right, so I went over to investigate, still half-hoping to find a torri, and came to another pasture, where I picked up a sheep trail back to the road.

  The intermittent vistas from this height were spectacular. I could see a whole descending range of maquis and flat pasture-lands falling toward the distant blue sea. Behind me there loomed a vast, ominous peak, Monte Pardu, I think, clothed on the lower slopes with a local species of evergreen known as laricio pine. The air was cool; the sun was warm; the rising mixed odor of maquis and forest filled my lungs; and I swung along the open road, refreshed and free and young, with no baggage of any sort weighing me down and no thoughts other than those of the moment. I could hear the cry of rooks, the sound of rushing streams, and the throaty jangle of cowbells from the unseen high pastures, and presuming myself alone, I began a skipping jig and started to sing aloud as I tripped onward and downward toward the sea and whatever future awaited me beyond these sceptered shores.

  I got back into town in the late afternoon and stopped at a café at the north end of the plaza, away from the boule pitch and my usual haunt. I ordered a beer and sat stretching my legs, watching the little children wheel round and round on the pointless carousel. Daydreaming there, I heard a familiar French-inflected English greeting behind me. It was le Baron himself, dressed in his linen suit and carrying his leather wallet.

  “What are you doing down here?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning fish?” He was joking, of course, but I explained, even though he probably already knew, that I was taking days off.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  I nodded and waved my hand toward the free chair. He ordered a local beer, and we sat talking about the Rose Café and some of the guests and the poor lonely dentist, Eugène, and the outing of Herr Komandante. This eventually brought him around to Marie.

  “She’s a devilish little scamp, isn’t she? Flirting with poor Eugène and all the others. Throwing over Chrétien as she did.”

  “He saw it coming,” I said. “I was with him the day Karen and her sister arrived. He was taken from the start.”

  “No need to worry about Chrétien, I suppose.”

  “No, he can take care of himself.”

  “I say, how well do you know Marie?” le Baron asked.

  “Pretty well. We talk. She thinks I’m a cowboy. She likes to hear about American life.”

  “I think there’s more to it than that,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  He drank, looked over at the bank.

  “Tu parla italiano?” he asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Si un po, perché?” I answered.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “How about Spanish?”

  “Yes, I lived there before I came to France.”

  “German?”

  “No. A little. But why do you ask?”

  “We see you shuffling around like a peasant from the maquis—limited French, pretending to be Italian around English speakers. Your friend Maggs was telling me she thinks it’s your trick, right? Makes it easier to eavesdrop, doesn’t it?”

  “Not really, I like languages. I just listen. I don’t speak any one language very well, though.”

/>   “Right, I saw you eavesdropping on that Dushko fellow. He knows a lot of languages.”

  “I noticed,” I said. “Where’s he from anyway?”

  “Dushko, ah, Dushko,” he said with sad resignation. “Who knows where Dushko is from. That’s probably not even his name.”

  “He was looking for you when he first came out here,” I said. “I’m afraid I tipped him off. I hope that was OK.”

  “Sure, he would have found me anyway. And it doesn’t matter.”

  “Who is he?”

  He laughed. “Who is Dushko? Now there’s a good question. Just don’t ask Dushko. He doesn’t know who he is. He’s a gambling man. A man without a country, blown across borders by the winds of war. He’s got any number of personae. Take your pick.”

  “Peter thought that. Buffeted around by wars?”

  “To say the least,” he said into his beer.

  Dushko, he explained, was one of those entrepreneurial types who seemed to be able to get himself out of any scrapes he fell into. Le Baron said he thought Dushko might be a Czech Jew or maybe a Serb, and had managed to survive the war a free man—mostly. He had been in business in Berlin before the war, he said, and was associated with some left-wing group that was opposed to the rising tide of fascism. He had a lot of connections in the international community, and he and a compatriot got the idea of running arms into Spain during the Civil War. He had contacts everywhere by then and wasn’t afraid to use them. At first he sold arms to the Republicans, but he got caught and thrown in prison. Then he cut some deal, got himself free, switched camps, and started selling guns to the Falangists. But he still had his old Republican contacts, le Baron said, and may still have been working with them. After the war, he escaped through Perpignan and disappeared into the refugee camps with the other Republican Spaniards. When the Second World War broke out, someone—probably in revenge—turned him over to the Gestapo for some unidentified crime and he ended up in prison again, back in Germany, in Berlin.

  “I think he got knocked around a bit while he was there. Somebody didn’t like his attitude. Or maybe they thought he had information,” le Baron said. “He was in solitary confinement but, you know—he made contacts—communication by tapping on pipes, that sort of thing.”

  Le Baron said that somehow, Dushko bartered his way out and after that ended up in Istanbul. He had no country by this time, no allegiances to anyone, nor any cause, neither fascist nor antifascist, nor communist, nor patriot. He would work for anyone, le Baron said. After the war he ended up in one of those little border towns in Eastern Europe where anyone could sell or buy anything, including passports and new identities. Somewhere along the way he got a press pass and a uniform. Cuban, le Baron thought, or Paraguayan, with a badge, papers, and calling card.

  “Uniforms counted for a great deal back then,” le Baron said. “So did papers. He was free to move anywhere.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked. “Is he a friend?”

  “He told me.”

  Le Baron said that half of what Dushko told anybody was probably a front, but that he didn’t make it up entirely. “Part of his story must be true,” he said. “He was always in and out of international trade, for example. But he was a good forger of documents, and he was also dealing in contraband. He managed to get himself down to Monte Carlo at some point with money in his pocket, and he was intelligent enough to win some earnings for a while. He may even have worked out a system to beat the wheel.”

  Le Baron was living in Nice at the time and used to see Dushko around. He was either rich or destitute. Never in between.

  “Once when I saw him he was living in a tent in a gypsy camp outside Nice. Next time I saw him he was in a tuxedo at the bar at the Negresco.”

  I took a chance and asked how it came to pass that he knew such a man as Dushko. Le Baron claimed that he had been working in a bank in Nice and that Dushko had come in to fill out an application for a loan.

  “The documentation was suspect. We could see that immediately, but for some reason, I liked him. He was such a good talker, such a great posturing liar, and he had all those stories. He could go on for hours with his tales of intrigue. He could talk or buy his way out of anything, I daresay. Even Nazi prisons. We had lunch one day and he pulled a card trick to see who would pick up the chit. I played, knowing what I was getting into, and he won, as I knew he would, of course. He amused me. Then he began to pester me, and then I dropped him. And now here he is again.”

  “He wants money?”

  “Dushko does not come looking for you to make social calls,” he said.

  He drained his beer and looked around for a waiter.

  “I must be going,” he said and left some coins on the table, more than enough to cover my beer as well as his, I noticed.

  We shook hands.

  “I say, would you like to come out to the villa some evening for dinner?” he asked. “Bring your little friend with you. She might enjoy the garden. I happen to know she is not unfamiliar with country houses.”

  The invitation was a little frightening, but I said I would like to come sometime if Jean-Pierre would liberate me from my dreaded scullery.

  He laughed again. “Of course he will,” he said. “I’ll mention it to him.”

  On another one of my free days, after a long nap I took a stroll out to the Ile de la Pietra to the Genoese tower. I hiked northward out over the red battlements of rocks and threaded my way between narrow passages to the isolated north shore of the islet. The ancient Genoese tower loomed above me like a judge, and in time I came to a blue-green, narrow cove. It was dead still and hot that day, and rather than smashing itself apart on the rocks as it often did in this exposed quarter, the smooth water simply rose and fell quietly, as if the sea were breathing. I stripped and dove in and floated there, dreaming of the vast sweep of human history that engulfed this part of the world—the old Torréens who built the menhirs and torri scattered around the island, the Phoenician traders nosing into the coves along the coast, the Greeks in their dark-prowed galleys, Romans in their cataphract triremes, Genoese, English, and French—and all of them warring with one another. Alone there, surrounded by the silent sky and the slow rise and fall of the quiet sea, I could almost hear somewhere in the distance the clash of bronze swords and the shouts of wave on wave of senseless armies hammering at each other—and to what end? “A quoi bon?” as Marie’s tutor Giancarlo used to say during his vast reviews of human history.

  Back on shore I dried off in the sun and carried on with my exploration, intending to circle the islet and return to my cottage on the little causeway. I was forced inland in some sections, and had to clamber up through narrow passages and then work my way back down to the shore. Halfway around, at the western end of the islet, I was once again forced upward, and on my way back down from the heights, I could see down to the flat, smooth-rock shore that ran out to the west. Here I saw a couple lounging, a blond woman stretched out flat and a sandy-haired man on his side, propped on his right elbow and leaning over the woman intimately. They were both nude and had been for a swim. I could see the gleam of water on their skin and their wet hair.

  It was a bit of a shock. I recognized André and Maggs.

  So as not to intrude I retreated, climbed over the top of the island, passed under the Genoese watchtower, and rested there for a while, my heart pounding.

  I knew that adults had affairs; illicit assignations were not uncommon in the New York suburb where I had grown up; and there were constant flirtations and affairs at the Rose Café. But this was somehow different. If it had been Chrétien with Karen, someone my age, I would have been amused. I had seen Maggs taking a coffee or a glass of beer with André and had seen them sometimes leaning close together in intimate conversation and dancing together when the gypsies were at the café. But I was too naive to realize that they were beginning an affair.

  Be that as it may, when I saw her the next day, Maggs joined me on the terrace and carrie
d on as if nothing had occurred over the past week that was in any way different from any other seven-day period. She chattered on about Poland and London, and the color of the sea beyond the harbor and that funny little man Pierrot, with his cocked eye and his down-at-heel espadrilles. The difference was in me, I realized, and I began to listen to her war stories in a new way, trying to work out an explanation for her betrayal of Peter. I had a dull, unformed thought that Peter was a bit of a bore, a quiet sort, with an obsession for spearfishing. On the other hand, he had to have something within him. I gathered from what Maggs had said that he was a fairly successful sculptor back in London, and I had heard that he had traveled around India on a motorcycle in his younger years.

  I sensed all along that something worse than the average horror of war-torn Warsaw was haunting Maggs. She often mentioned a certain Nazi officer in her stories of her Warsaw youth. She had spoken of him so often I began to wonder if she had perhaps been his girlfriend, and in fact once I ventured to merely hint at asking her in as indirect a manner as I could summon. But with her seemingly instinctive ability to read character and thoughts, she must have seen it coming and dodged the question before I was even able to launch it. She went on to speak of the officer’s many qualities: I gather he was older, and, at least in her view (she must have been about seventeen), worldly and civilized, fluent in languages, knew all about ancient Greece, and used to quote long passages from Friedrich Hölderlin to her. He could also play the piano.

  “Once I was with him in a little bistro when no one was around,” she said. “He saw a piano. ‘Ah ha,’ he said. ‘Please excuse me for one moment.’ He went over, sat down, and played a few little Mozart passages. Then he rested a minute, rubbed his hands together, and set into the opening bars of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He must have been studying for years …”

  She drew a breath and looked out at the harbor.

  “But then one day when I was with him on the street, we came suddenly upon a Jewish family …”