The Strange Case of Rachel K

by Rachel Kushner

  “How about a walk. An ice cream cone?” Prio said to Rachel K, the evening he gave her the pendant and the dress. They were sitting in Prio’s private booth, decorated like a Roman grotto with panorama-print Classical scenery, plaster figurines, and purple-leafed wandering Jew tumbling down the walls like ivy.

  She hadn’t expected a walk, an ice cream. She’d expected, Go to the palace Green Room and cooperate fully. But his tenderness—opals, dresses, ice cream cones—was part of why she liked him best. Not because he spoiled her, but because he could be embarrassing and sentimental.

  They left the club and went to nearby La Rampa, a grand avenue of deluxe sundae parlors where the rich strolled and licked. Exclusive confection boutiques that would later be replaced by an enormous State-run ice cream emporium, a concrete spaceship that gave away twenty-five thousand bowls of government-issue vanilla and strawberry every day. A drab and massive enterprise that would be the future government’s elaborate fuck you to the rich, to the presidents and their prostitutes, who’d strolled and licked along La Rampa in Havana’s diamond days.

  Prio chose chocolate chip and she guava, a fruit that tasted deliciously unnatural. More like perfume than something you were supposed to eat. They were strolling and licking and window-shopping along La Rampa, Rachel K laughing at Prio, who looked unpresidential, she said, with ice cream in his mustache. A member of his dark-suited security team, who normally walked a few paces behind, approached and tapped Prio’s shoulder. The man leaned in and whispered something. Prio, still with ice cream frosting the tines of his mustache, blanched. He turned to Rachel K. “I must leave you now,” he said in a shaky voice. “Lelo here will take you back to the club.”

  That night of strolling and licking on La Rampa was Prio’s last night as president. With the military’s cooperation, an army general named Batista staged a coup. “Easy as ordering a birthday cake from Schrafft’s,” Rachel K heard an American at the Tokio remark. One moment, Prio was on La Rampa, laughing and window-shopping, while his wife and children slept in their cream-colored sleigh beds. And then suddenly he and his family were huddling in the piss elegance of the Dominican embassy, booking airline tickets out. Batista had telephoned from Miami, promising to buy all the army officers new uniforms, and in return they gave undying loyalty. Surrounded the palace with tanks. People talked about the coup as the end of so-called democracy. Until later in the week, when the American ambassador endorsed the new government, celebrating Batista as business-friendly and a hallmark of a new era in Cuban-American relations. Prio settled in Miami and pursued a career as a stage actor. He might have been relieved, as Rachel K suspected, to have the presidency stolen from him and to pursue his long-held dream of becoming a stage actor. She herself didn’t care about politics. Though on a personal level she preferred Prio to the new president, a greedy man who knew how to manipulate people but never had anything interesting to say.

  De la Mazière was at his table in the back, watching the bartender with the face in a minor key play canasta with a dancer. The bartender won, but his face remained dolorous, as if winning were a burden, one more sad duty to perform. This was a few days after the coup. De la Mazière wondered about Rachel K, who she’d visit with now that Prio had fled the island. His pick would not have been a small-time gangster-leftist and his younger brother. These two entered the club and waited by the bar, awkwardly, as if they’d never been inside a place like the Tokio. Rachel K led the gangster and his brother to a booth in the back of the room. This gangster was increasingly well known. An instant enemy of the new State, he’d fired his gun on the plaza of the university in protest of the coup. The police had fired back, and then Batista shut the campus down. The younger brother had his notoriety as well, if in a different way: he was queer as a three-dollar bill, with hair on his upper lip so pre-pubescent it looked like cupcake crumbs. The three of them stayed in the booth for what seemed to de la Mazière like quite a while. When the curtain finally opened, he watched them file out. The gangster and his brother each shook Rachel K’s hand, as if one of them had just sold the other a used car, or a piece of real estate. Formal handshakes among a gangster, faggot, and a variety dancer. It was certainly peculiar.

  The next evening de la Mazière was watching television in his hotel suite, as Batista made his acceptance speech. He was a mulatto with soft features, a faint severity straining his smile, a mean streak that couldn’t quite be suppressed. His general’s uniform was littered with medals and badges, every color of stripe and ribbon. He looked ridiculous. De la Mazière thought of Darnand with his French decorations—“bonbons”—attached to his new Sturmbannführer’s uniform. Medals Darnand had won fighting the Germans on the Maginot Line, pinned under his new silver-stitched SS insignia.

  Batista smiled and made his face handsome. “I am a dictator with the people,” he said. The television cut to footage from the day before, this Cuban army general stepping off a plane from Miami and kneeling to kiss the tarmac, apparently overcome with love for his country. Home after his exile. Prio now in exile. The army general home. Everyone switching places as the chips fell. Darnand fled to Germany, but the stakes were so much higher. He wasn’t a small-time factotum from a banana republic, and there wasn’t any Miami, a place to cool his heels and wait things out playing canasta under a lanai. Darnand was captured. Brought to Paris. Executed.

  A memory bloomed in de la Mazière’s mind of the earlier, glory days in Paris. Armistice follies and occupation fun. Civilian elites like himself, bourgeoisie, scum and profiteers roaming with pockets full of cash. The particular, hushed feeling of the city at dusk, the violet-blushing emptiness of the Parisian sky. Riding through the streets in a black Mercedes while destitute people traveled on foot, begging and scavenging. What had he cared the city was “annexed?” Or that Hitler, “le grand Jules” they called him, surveyed the Champs-Élysées and visited Sacré-Coeur? It was a free-for-all, the old social distinctions collapsed, a place now structured less on class and more on cleverness, the gray market, the black market, privilege and opportunism. Controlled by profiteers, royalists and moneyed riffraff. Le Boeuf sur le Toit and Maxim’s did booming business, packed for all-night parties of crystal-clinking pandemonium. German boys loitering in the lobby of the Ritz, their muscles pressing up against the perfectly creased fabric of their uniforms, anxious to polish your boots. Their sergeants, stripped to the waist, sun-tanned on the steps of the Louvre. At Fifine’s on the Rue St. Denis, girls rode topless on carousel horses like lithe, buttery-bodied centaurs, the carousel revolving at an erotic, slow keel. An impossible time, that time in Paris. Impossible even as it was happening.

  But he didn’t want to return to those days, just certain parts of them. He didn’t want to wait for hours at the Vichy palace while Pétain refused to see him, de la Mazière standing at attention, a Frenchman in a German uniform. And though he’d won a frozen meat medal, he’d as soon eat actual frozen meat as fight Bolsheviks again, in the heavy snows of Pomerania. A place of misery and death, where his regiment was pulverized and scattered and he became an animal, eating raw horseflesh and sleeping in the snow. He understood painfully well that you couldn’t recreate a moment of ignorance, a luminous bubble winking in the folds of memory. A bubble that he later saw had floated in a tide of darkness. All he could do was keep going until he found a bubble somewhere on the map. In Havana there was no war, no snow, no shame. There was, instead, softness, flesh and decadence masking some kind of horror, like makeup over a bruise.

  Earlier on the evening that de la Mazière and Rachel K finally spoke, she’d been entertaining Batista. Batista in his medal-glittering uniform, a dictator wonderfully “with” the people. De la Mazière had watched as she and the president, surrounded by thugs, passed through the Pam-Pam Room to a VIP grotto.

  “You have friends in high places,” de la Mazière said to her.

  “Who says they’re friends?” she asked.

  “Ah. How right you are. Friendship is built
on loyalty,” he said. “Not services rendered by a fille de joie. But you and the former president, Prio, I think you were friendly.”

  “Friendliness is a service,” she said. “He’s gone, and I’m not hearing any violins.”

  De la Mazière smiled. “You’re too busy cavorting with his enemy.” He had his two hands clasped around her upper thigh, a garter belt of human fingers banding her leg. “If this was Paris, after the—” he paused and made quotes with his fingers, “—‘liberation’—they’d shave your head, mademoiselle.” He reached up and stroked her coarse blonde hair with the attention of a hairdresser assessing locks he was about to shear.

  The French women who’d cavorted with Germans couldn’t hide their Nazi trysts any better than their ears, while de la Mazière wove incredible fabrications and repatriated with little problem. Spent his jail time in a luxury cell, his labor assignment: organizing the warden’s formal dinner parties. Until a mysterious yellow telex arrived, pardoning him after only five years. Returning to France had been in a sense the same as leaving to fight against it: both were thresholds of radical disconnection. Twice now, he’d burned all his papers and identification. Twice, crossing a threshold had promised an instant crumbling of his own past.

  The Frenchman was grabbing locks of Rachel K’s hair and running them through his fingers. He pulled firmly at her scalp, but it was a pleasant sort of firmly, a gently-firmly.

  “Friendliness is a service,” he said. “Of course. You need privacy. Ease of mobility. People get in the way.”

  They really did, she thought. Even Prio. Near the end, he came around too frequently, and she felt a wearying duty to keep fixing herself into something familiar and consistent that he could recognize.

  “Friendship,” de la Mazière said, tugging her hair to angle her face toward his, “is a barbaric concept.”

  He was looking at her, and she had the funny feeling that if time and everyone suspended in its viscous grip was just then frozen, only the two of them would be left as they were, sentient and unfrozen.

  “It’s funny, I must have been mistaken,” he said. “I remembered your hair as quite a bit longer. Even last night.” It was above her neck. He knew he wasn’t mistaken. He was being coy.

  “I cut it,” she said. “Bleached hair doesn’t have full value.” But the truth was that she’d overvalued her hair. In every fantasy she had, every impossible scenario that floated into her mind, she always had waist-length hair. As if long hair were part of a tendency to indulgence, delusion, impossibility. And so she’d bladed it to her chin that morning, long platinum hair gone into the trash. Slumped and lustrous, like a discarded wig.

  “What do you like to do?” he asked, “besides cut your hair and paint your legs?”

  All men at the Tokio asked this. What do you like? It was part of the tête-à-tête of her profession, but what the men wanted was a limited variety of set responses: I like pleasing you. I like squirming on your lap. I like to fantasize about a man just like you watching me take my clothes off. I think about it when I’m alone, and I have to put my own little girl hands in my underwear, just to stop the longing to be on your lap. Gullibility was beside the point: hearing these things was a performance the men were paying for. They didn’t really want to know what she liked, and it never would have occurred to her to tell them. But she figured that the Frenchman, with his bemused half-smile, was too clever to want such an obvious put-on. He seemed to understand flirtation—real flirtation, and not a bluntly performed simulation of it. She suspected that if she said “I like squirming on your lap,” he’d surely laugh his head off, and at her expense.

  “I like those few days of the year when it’s cold here, at the end of hurricane season,” she said. “It’s cold enough you need a sweater. And at night, blankets. But I don’t fall asleep with blankets over me. I leave them down at the end of the bed and make myself fall asleep uncovered. When I wake up later in the night, freezing cold, I reach down and pull up all the blankets.”

  De la Mazière thought of this girl making herself fall asleep cold, naked and uncovered in order to then feel warmth with more intensity. He couldn’t help but imagine being the warm body that smothered this petite girl, cold and shivering on a mattress. Though he didn’t want to be just the warmth, he realized, but the cold as well. What preceded, in this fantasy, was him stripping the bed and leaving her shivering in nothing. Maybe underwear. Him, making her cold. And then warm.

  He looked at her Manouche gypsy or German Jewish face, this girl with her ink-laced legs and her K name, so obviously middle European. Among giant-sized strippers, tomcat actor-presidents, gangsters and homosexuals. Still, she stuck out.

  “I think you should tell me your story,” he said. Not that he didn’t believe the orphaned-at-a-burlesque club tale, but he wanted something else. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted a made-up story or a true story, or even what the difference was. People talked about character, a defining sort of substance. But deception was a substance as well, as relevant and admirable as what it covered. If it covered anything, that is. He had great empathy for affects and evasions.

  “Okay here’s a story,” she said. “A man named Ferdinand K came over from France. He worked in cinema. Met a girl named Aloha. My grandmother. She was young. Younger than I am. They had a baby—my mother—the nothing, and then they both dropped dead of venereal diseases. My mother, the orphan, was a street urchin. I don’t know who my father is. I told you the rest of it already.”

  “You’ve told me circumstances. Not story.”

  She looked slightly hurt. “Okay, fine. Maybe you should tell me your story,” she said, catching his eye through the tinted lenses, “Ambassador.”

  He smiled as if to say, no problem, watch me give you nothing. “I’m Christian de la Mazière. And okay, I’m not an ambassador.” He paused. “I’m a journalist.”

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  “I suppose I am.”

  “And you know what else? I have a feeling you dismiss lowly ‘circumstances’ because you’re not willing to cough them up.”

  “Why should I divulge what is meaningless?” he said. “A banal dossier of ‘this was my grandfather, I was steered into this or that profession.’ My existence is free of those tedious things.”

  “I bet the opposite is true,” she said. “I bet you live in a prison of your ‘tedious’ past.”

  “It isn’t a prison,” he said. “You’ll see.” And then he fell quiet, as if her accusation had sent him drifting into contemplation.

  If only it were tedious, he thought at her, but didn’t say out loud. If only. In fact, it’s sordid and remarkable to have been an incidental SS. With no war, no army, no country. Only floating memories of medals and Maxim’s and going to fight the Bolsheviks, thinking fascism was better than Stalin and that I was fighting for heritage and class, and then knowing that I wasn’t. That it had nothing to do with politics or ideals. Of course, there were some with ideals. Not me. But I had conviction—you might even call it rare—the conviction to enlist at the Hotel Majestic on a stifling hot August day in 1944, when the war was already lost. Why I enlisted. I’m still not sure, but a reason was beside the point: It was a pure sacrifice, empty of reasons, a bigger, more grand self-erasure. On my way to enlist, I saw people shuttling into the Velodrome. I won’t deny that I saw them, being led inside. I was a helmeted dreamer who waited in a German uniform while Pétain dozed in his chambers. Pétain in his kepi with the scrambled eggs braid, who refused to see us, the few who were ready to keep going, the only people, correction, the only person with the conviction to fight to lose, to test nothing but extremes. They all caved and Pétain slept in his kepi with the scrambled eggs braid. I’m a man who had to go it alone, fight with conviction and for nothing, with men who didn’t speak my language. The only one who didn’t cave.

  Fair enough, he thought. She’s no more mysterious than I am to myself. And so here I am, in a burlesque club below the Tropic of Cance
r, in this damp city where dreams are marbled with nothingness.

  It was time for her show.

  The blue lights flipped on. Smoky haze drifted above the tables.

  “Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”

  Copyright © 2015 by Rachel Kushner

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be produced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Bomb, Soft Targets, and Descant, where these stories first appeared.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as a New Directions book in 2015

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Kushner, Rachel.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The strange case of Rachel K / Rachel Kushner. — First edition.

  ISBN 978-0-8112-2421-5

  ISBN 978-0-8112-2422-2 (e-book)

  I. Title.

  PS3611.U7386A6 2015

  813'.6—dc23 2014032864

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions Publishing Corporation

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