Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  Lou said, “Everyone’s smiling.”

  Inge laughed. “An order came down from the Führer. This is the week of smiles. But is that this week or next week? No one can remember. So we’re smiling both weeks, just to play it safe!”

  She smiled at Lou, who smiled back. Why shouldn’t everyone smile? Everyone they passed on the street looked prosperous and well fed. Lou couldn’t help comparing them with the depressed, malnourished Parisians. The French had brought it on themselves. They shouldn’t have taken away her license.

  Lou took Inge’s hand to communicate her sympathy for how the Germans had suffered. Inge’s hand was surprisingly calloused, her grip unusually strong. So was Lou’s. They were drivers.

  Inge said, Look around! Despite the lies Lou had probably read in the anti-German press, there were no signs prohibiting Jews from entering public buildings and private establishments. Did Lou see any? No! Nor were there any laws against Jewish-owned businesses or stores.

  Lou said, “So what if there were?” With that, she and Inge reached a deeper level of understanding.

  When Lou had traveled the racing circuit with the Rossignols, they’d stayed in first-class hotels. But nothing had prepared her for the Kaiserhof. The spasm of bows and Heil Hitlers their arrival set off among men in top hats and tails made Lou wheel around to see whom the men were greeting. There was no one behind them. Touched by her new friend’s skittishness, Inge squeezed Lou’s arm.

  In the vast domed lobby, more banners and swastikas swayed above the frosted glass, the iron braziers, the Persian carpets. Lou thought it was a good sign: the same grandeur inside and out. Inge showed Lou to the door of her room, kissed her on the cheek, and let her fingers trail against Lou’s forearm when she said she’d pick her up at seven.

  Inge had written that, on Lou’s first night in Berlin, they would be dining at the Chancellery. With the Führer! Though if the Führer changed his mind and canceled at the last moment, Lou shouldn’t be surprised, or take it personally, or think it was about her.

  Lou bathed and rubbed her skin with the perfumed oils the hotel provided for free. She fixed her hair and changed into an attractive, if uncomfortably feminine, tuxedo. She was tying her bow tie when the front desk called. Fraulein Wallser was waiting downstairs.

  If Inge had looked like a flower today, tonight she was a snowflake that melted on contact as she hooked her arm through Lou’s. The black Mercedes was driven by the same severe driver, but this time she nodded coolly at Lou and said, “Guten Abend, Fraulein Villars.”

  Inge talked all the way there, repeating things she’d said that afternoon and pointing out yet more positive changes the Führer had made. Again she complained about the foreign press and its lies, among them the preposterous falsehood that, under the Reich, one could no longer have a fabulous time at the city’s nightspots. Inge would be happy to show Lou around, if she liked. Speech failed Lou when she tried to say how much she would like it.

  Admittedly, the nightlife wasn’t quite what it had been in the old days, when there was something for everyone. By which Inge meant everyone. People said it was paradise, but what is paradise without a serpent? And they’d had more than their share of serpents!

  Lou nodded so hard her neck ached. That had been her experience too. Maybe someday she could tell Inge about those vipers, Arlette and Clovis Chanac. How Inge would laugh when she heard that evil snakes were running an establishment called the Garden of Eden.

  The clubs in Berlin had been sanitized, Inge said, which was a pity, though it was probably good that they had closed the places that degraded honest Germans. The degenerate Jewish lesbian bars should never have existed! All the grand old establishments with a respectable clientele—the Monte Carlo, the Heaven and Hell, The Cockadoodle, the Stork’s Nest, the White Mouse—were alive and well and in business, thank you very much. At Rio Rita, you could still telephone a girl or boy at another table. If Lou wanted, she and Inge could take a night off from official functions. Have a few drinks and relax!

  Inge’s voice rose in a birdlike trill that wobbled on the high notes, then pitched her over into unrelated subjects. When Inge stopped racing, she might go to work in the party’s public relations office, because the truth wasn’t getting out. Especially in America, where Jews controlled the press. Hadn’t it been awful, that pathetic attempt to boycott the Olympics because of how Germany was supposedly treating its Jews. In fact a Jewish fencer, Eileena Mayer, was probably going to bring home the gold, or at least the silver, medal for the Reich. It was a pity that Herr Goebbels didn’t like Eileena. No matter what happened at the games, her career would go nowhere, because stupid Eileena, arrogant like the rest of her tribe, refused to fuck him.

  Lou laughed, as she was supposed to. She was trying to remember what she’d heard about Goebbels.

  During her trial, the youngest and most hotheaded lawyer had wanted to read an item that had appeared in the French papers. Goebbels had said that a government should not concern itself with whether a woman wore trousers or skirts. Eventually the more moderate lawyers persuaded him that their case would not be helped by quoting the Nazi minister of propaganda.

  Though the statement went unread in court, Lou had, ever since, felt a fondness for Herr Goebbels. But now Inge was telling her that Goebbels was not their best friend in the higher echelons of the party. Conceited about his education, he looked down on sports and games. Inge would like to see what good all that education did him if she challenged him to a couple of laps, one on one, at the track.

  Was Inge on some sort of drug? Lou thought fondly of how Armand had rambled when he was high. It was odd, how life kept throwing a person together with a certain other kind of person. Lou had never heard someone make fun of education. Inge was her soul mate.

  Inge said, “Everything here is the opposite of what outsiders think. Everything except the rare good reports, which happen to be true. Do you know that Frederick the Great is the Führer’s idol? Why doesn’t the foreign press ever mention the genius of modeling yourself after Germany’s greatest king?

  “And speaking of the Führer . . .” Inge grasped Lou’s arm with both hands and gazed into her eyes. Her own eyes were a matte gray, like the backs of two pewter spoons. “People see those awful newsreels and imagine he is scary. Jumping and yelling and jerking around like some crazy marionette. I can tell you, the Führer is a sweetheart and a great leader, a hero to whom we owe everything. We will die for him, if we have to.”

  Inge giggled, released Lou, and sank back against the seat. “But oh, dear God, how he loves the sound of his own voice! He can go on for a whole dinner, boring everyone silly. Once he brings up vegetarianism, you’re in for forty minutes of recipes for his mother’s Bavarian nut cutlets.

  “Obviously, no one says this. Tell a joke about him, even a nice one, and you’ll wind up in jail. A Berlin woman was executed for telling a story about Heydrich saying to the Führer that if he wanted to make the German people smile, he should jump off the roof! I know I can trust you, can’t I, Lou?”

  Lou grinned like a maniac. Trust me.

  “Sometimes after the Führer goes to bed, always early, the young officers get together with the prettier girls (there are always pretty girls around the Führer) and a junior officer will drink too much and say, ‘There are two possibilities.’ And everyone will almost die laughing, because it’s one of the Führer’s favorite phrases. Just the words nut cutlets give everyone the giggles.”

  Inge told Lou that she shouldn’t worry if she felt nervous around the Führer. Everybody did. After all this time, even though Inge saw him almost as a friend, she still got the shakes in his presence. Usually, her trembling fits subsided within a few minutes.

  “Until then I quake like a leaf. Something just comes over me There’s nothing I can do.”

  Lou was starting to be alarmed that her translator and guide to an evening among the highest German officials was an auto racer on drugs who had fits in the Führer’s pres
ence. But Armand had proved how well the impaired can function. It was too late to worry now. How would Lou choose, if she had to, between having sex with Inge Wallser and meeting Adolf Hitler? Maybe she wouldn’t have to choose. Maybe she would get it all. Inge, the Führer, a driving job, and an adopted homeland that respected its athletes and would understand the need for a racetrack Joan of Arc.

  Inge said, “I think one reason the Führer is so eager to meet you is that cars mean the world to him. The world. He’s infatuated with his Mercedes! Even though—can you believe it?—he never really learned to drive. Whenever he can, he rides in front beside his driver.

  “Unless he has to stand in back of the open car to greet his millions of fans. Millions! For a while he had a mechanic . . . the Führer’s tire had a blowout. Bang! Bang! Everyone panicked! We thought: an assassination attempt! Only our Führer kept a cool head. That mechanic left Munich and has never been heard from since.” Inge giggled.

  An awful thought occurred to Lou. Was that why she’d been brought here? To work as a mechanic?

  She said, “I assume the Führer has a good mechanic now.”

  “Naturally,” said Inge. “Herr Boehm and his men were required to pass top security clearance. I knew them from the racetrack until the Führer stole them. But it was an honor to sacrifice the country’s best pit crew for the safety of our leader.”

  As they pulled up in front of a sort of fortress, uniformed men swarmed the car, peering into the windows. When they saw Inge they opened the doors, and two soldiers escorted Inge and Lou through the magisterial gate that swung open as they approached.

  They made a handsome couple, two champion women drivers, one in a filmy white dress, one in a black tuxedo. Picturing them, on that fateful night, one can’t help conflating the image with that of Lou and Arlette in Gabor Tsenyi’s portrait.

  Arm in arm, Inge and Lou made their way (Inge bouncing and skipping, Lou gently holding her back) along a corridor, past rows of gilded columns. Lou decided not to drink tonight. She could no more let down her guard here than behind the wheel during a race.

  A queue of guests had formed outside the door of a ballroom. “Don’t be afraid,” said Inge as Lou looked through the door at a receiving line of smiling men in suits or uniforms, and a few women, also smiling, also beautifully dressed. Inge fluttered into action, chatting with the minders whose job it was to tell the dignitaries whose hand they were shaking. The Germans and most of the athletes knew Inge. For the diplomats, lady racers were a welcome change from ministers of war.

  Everyone was polite to Lou and intrigued to see a woman in a tuxedo. It was well known that the Führer liked men to be men and women to be women, and people wondered why he had made an exception in Lou’s case.

  Lou was happy to follow Inge’s lead. The line moved so slowly that Inge had time to tell Lou who everyone was. Lou was impressed, enchanted, by how much Inge knew.

  Inge said to stand up straight and pay attention as they approached Hans von Tschammer und Osten, the Reichssportsführer. The minister kissed both women’s hands and asked Lou if she knew how lucky she was to have, as her friend, Berlin’s “It Girl” of the moment.

  Inge blushed. “Oh, please, Herr Minister.”

  “The moment,” said the minister’s wife, urging them down the line.

  “We’ll talk again,” Von Tschammer und Osten promised, leering clownishly at Inge.

  Hess, Göring, Himmler, Heydrich, von Ribbentrop. It was hard to remember who was who. Lou recognized names she’d heard before, and a scatter of new ones. She found it easier to tell the women apart, because they were women, and also because there were so few. Among them was Wagner’s widow and the Berlin socialites, who, Inge whispered, had raised fortunes for the Führer and whom he still visited faithfully, if less frequently, for tea and the linzer torte he nibbled when Hess wasn’t watching.

  Inge introduced Lou to a pair of statuesque British sisters with blond hair, red lips, fixed smiles, and no interest in Lou. One spoke a German so basic that even Lou understood when she asked Inge what she was doing after dinner. Inge said she was taking Lou back to her hotel.

  But the sisters were already raising their arms in the National Socialist salute (from which Lou, as a foreigner, was officially exempted) as a man with a chest full of medals edged Lou and Inge along.

  During the wait to shake Fraulein Riefenstahl’s hand, Inge said, “Don’t take it to heart if the skinny bitch looks right through you. She thinks she’s the queen of the universe because she’s filming the games!” Inge would have liked to be included in the film. But she hadn’t been asked, from jealousy or some political reason, though it was also possible that someone just forgot.

  As promised, the film director was ice, pure ice, and they moved along to Herr Goebbels, standing beside her. When Goebbels heard auto racing, his face stiffened, and he absentmindedly, though it wasn’t absentminded at all, rested his hand on Fraulein Riefenstahl’s bony behind. Before Lou could think of a subtle way to call this to Inge’s attention, she spotted the Führer at the end of the line.

  She leaned against Inge for support, but Inge was already trembling. Her tremors were so contagious that Lou almost lost her footing and silently thanked Fraulein Schiller and the Japanese monk for her balance training.

  Could some German scientist have found a way to install a high-wattage lightbulb inside the Führer’s head? He emitted ten times the radiance of a normal human being, and his eyes were a hundred times brighter than the cloudy lenses through which ordinary humans peered. Lou had never seen a man exude such simple modesty combined with such charisma. He was like a temple idol! How strange that his guests were shaking his hand or saluting him instead of doing the logical thing: flinging themselves at his feet. The air around Lou seemed to thicken. A grainy nausea rose into her throat.

  The Führer took Inge’s hand and kissed it, then did the same to Lou. Everyone was watching. Even those still waiting outside the door craned for a better look. Lou had driven a race car at a hundred miles an hour. But standing before the Führer as he kissed her hand was like driving faster, around a curve, in a typhoon.

  She looked down. She and Inge were holding hands like schoolgirls, like siblings in a fairy tale.

  “Fraulein Wallser,” the Führer said. “And Fraulein Villars.” Then something else in German. Lou glanced at Inge, whose face was red, her breathing shallow.

  “What did he say?” Lou asked, more sharply than she meant to.

  “He says he is looking forward to chatting with you at dinner.”

  The Führer studied each of them, staring into their eyes. Then he turned to a man in a top hat and tails who came up behind them.

  Chatting with her at dinner? Had Inge translated right?

  Inge looked as shocked as Lou. Because it made no sense. The guest list included champion athletes, ambassadors, Olympics committee members, artists, party officials, European royalty. The Führer was looking forward to talking to two girl racers?

  “Don’t ask me,” said Inge. “Sometimes the Führer does something apparently for no reason. Later it turns out to be the most brilliant, inspired thing that anyone could have done. That’s why he’s a great leader. Everybody knows that.”

  Weak with excitement and nerves, Inge and Lou helped each other through a doorway into another, larger room. Near the door stood men with crystal goblets of wine. Lou took one, but Inge shook her head, and Lou gave it back.

  Inge said, “Whatever you do, don’t get the Führer started on drinking. Not unless you want to spend the evening hearing that beer is the hereditary enemy of the German people, right up there with the Jews. If we didn’t need the export income, he would close all the breweries tomorrow. No one drinks when he’s around. Later we all get smashed.” Lou loved it when Inge assumed she could speak freely about the Führer because she knew that Lou adored and revered him as much as she did.

  By now they had worked their way among the knots of partygoers who made room f
or the “It Girl” and her French friend, knots that unraveled because the guests had seen the Führer kissing the women’s hands. Lou nodded when she was supposed to, smiled when she was supposed to. The Führer was looking forward to chatting with them at dinner.

  Not until they went into the dining room, and Inge found their place cards flanking the Führer’s, did Lou and Inge believe it.

  “It still might not happen,” warned Inge. “He often changes his mind at the last minute, for security reasons, just as he changes the route he takes from his home to the airport. . . .”

  The guests sat down, but when the Führer came in, everyone rose, most with outstretched arms, Lou among them. It felt good to do what the Germans did, saluting the Führer as he deserved. How else could she show him that she believed in him too? A bodyguard pulled out Inge’s chair, another pulled out Lou’s. It was awkward, but after lifting their behinds several times, they were settled on either side of the Führer. It was also clumsy when the Führer spoke to Lou, and Inge had to lean around him to translate. But ultimately it had the effect of bringing them closer together.

  The Führer went on for so long that Inge seemed anxious that she would forget what he’d said.

  Inge explained she’d told a friend that Lou had remarked that entering Berlin was like driving into the heart of a great empire. Her gossipy friend had told someone, who told the Führer, who liked what Lou said very much. He says that it is exactly how he wants our guests to feel.

  “Merci,” said Lou. “Danke schön.”

  The Führer asked if she liked the hotel. Lou nodded. The Führer seemed pleased and said something about Herr Hess.

  Inge said, “The Führer used to love the linzer torte at the Kaiserhof, but Hess has forbidden it because the cook is a Communist. Hess thinks he might poison the Führer.” The Führer added something that included “Fraulein Villars,” then laughed.

  Inge said, “He says you can eat all the cake you want, Fraulein Villars. You seem like a good soul who might be very fond of cake.” Inge laughed. Lou laughed. She should have lost twenty more pounds. The Führer laughed again. Laughing together set them apart. It was the sort of laughter that would have made the other guests envious, even if Lou and Inge weren’t laughing with the Führer.