Good People

by Nir Baram

  ‘Maybe it just seems that way, but I’m hearing more Russian in the streets than Polish. You work fast,’ he observed.

  ‘Monsieur Heiselberg, in the street you hear the will of the people.’ She noted that recently the residents of Brest had been seeing German planes. The Red Army air force was acting responsibly and escorting them out of Soviet air space, but those incursions didn’t improve trust.

  ‘Our pilots are young and not fully trained,’ he recited. This was the excuse Frenzel had given to him, but a half-smile showed that it seemed weak to him as well. ‘Aside from that, they’ve heard so much about Communism, can you blame them for being curious?’

  ‘The parade will completely satisfy their curiosity.’ She leaned towards him, flushed and excited.

  Perhaps his elegant appearance at the first meeting had influenced her. This time, instead of wearing an ugly skirt whose edges had yellowed and a faded jacket, an abundance of joyous colours flowed from her body: a skirt with red and white polka dots, a tight coat with a plunging lapel. Her dark hair was combed to the side, and it had a bluish glow. She was all gathered in, tirée à quatre épingles. His fear of her eyes had ebbed away; at the railway station he already noticed that the look he remembered was not like the one she was giving him today, and he began to wonder whether the whole thing was a monster he had inflated in his imagination.

  They reached the conference room in the afternoon. It was on the ground floor of an old building on a side street. She led him down a corridor that smelled of naphthalene. The hallway arrived at a small office where cobwebs hung over shelves laden with rolls of paper. They went through a doorway into a vaulted room, in the centre of which stood a rectangular wooden table. The brass doorhandles had been polished that morning, and on the floor were patches of white plaster that had been hastily scraped.

  She announced with an apologetic smile that this was her new kingdom. She couldn’t get the necessary inspiration for planning the parade in a bustling office. This was a lie, of course. Her new office had been created for this meeting; naturally her colleagues were not enthusiastic about having a German diplomat—and a diplomat was really an authorised spy—wandering about their offices.

  A large sheet of paper was hung on each wall of the room. Two were maps sketched in charcoal, and the others were bright drawings of lawns and cypresses frozen like dark feathers, soldiers in uniform, behind them a blue river, carrot-topped children on a rose-coloured path cheering for a column of toad-coloured tanks. Where were the women in crinoline, carrying parasols? He stifled a laugh—the children looked like fish in a bouillabaisse.

  The sheets of paper hid the windows and blocked the daylight. Two table lamps cast weak beams of light, and their shadows skipped from map to map. She stood in the middle of the room, twirled on her tiptoes as though saying, please be excited! Then she approached him, her face glowing and her bandaged hand behind her back, in a gesture of respect. He couldn’t remember whether she had concealed her hand at their first meeting. Now they were hidden away here, she had shaken off her chilly manners, and the professional restraint she had insisted on, even when laughing, vanished.

  Doubtless she noticed his slight reservations about the decor, but she apparently had no doubt of her ability to inspire him. An interesting woman, Comrade Weissberg…Did the maps really have an intoxicating effect on her, or was it all an act? How disappointing that both possibilities seemed equally probable.

  And there was something else: the parade was her entire world. She would tie a loop at the end of every sentence and, after every friendly exchange, toss the loop in a trice over another sentence, knotting them together into a conclusion involving some aspect of the parade. He found it hard to follow the pace of her loop-tying. When she noticed that his interest was waning, she would quickly present another irresistible idea, like a child feeding a dying bonfire.

  She dragged him on a tour of the maps: this was the 1939 parade, and this is where the retinues stood, and this is the route the column took, and this black line represents the belt of people who watched, and here was the new parade: the armies deployed in three rows, grass-green, olive-green and grey tanks with a red star in front and tanks with a swastika, small cannon whose barrels were pointed at the horizon, and here was the parade through the streets of Brest, exactly along the route they had just taken. The gold dots showed the column descending from the bridges over the river, pouring out of the sun and storming the city. She would, of course, include his excellent comments.

  She surveyed the maps lovingly, dwelling on the flaws, and when she touched them to emphasise a point her fingers removed invisible specks of dust.

  He acknowledged the ‘deep impression’ made by the design of the maps and the professional work, and was careful not to pass judgment on the ideas. When they stood in front of the last map, he felt a stab of pain in his right knee, which he had tired out on their walk that morning, and he wanted to sink onto one of the chairs. But she remained standing next to the picture of the sky over the fortress, decorated with flashes of fire, and presented her vision of searchlights and flares rising from the cannon. The searchlights reminded him of the light ship from the advertisements for Persil, one of his brilliant ideas at Milton, as well as a slogan that lit the Berlin sky: ‘Paul Hindenburg for President of the Reich.’

  She smoothed her dress, which soon dotted the room: red and white spots appeared no matter where he looked. For now it was impossible to tell her about his recent actions, to speak reason with her, present his plan. It was too dangerous. She might go wild and destroy everything. He had to gain her confidence so that she would acknowledge the true state of affairs.

  In a sympathetic tone he asked how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had responded to her plan. She spun around to him, hostile, and said that, as he knew, very few people were in on the secret.

  He sat down. She detached herself from the maps and seated herself at the head of the table, her eyes open, as in a waking dream. He was prepared to bet his apartment in Berlin that he was the first person to see the maps. Her anticipation of approval was not disappointed—he praised her profusely—but it wasn’t enough. Maybe she sensed his artificial tone. Like an actress returning for another curtain call, she asked his opinion of the maps again, and this time he showered her with compliments. That seemed to calm her down.

  Then she stood up again and began to describe her multi-stage plan for the parade. She delivered the lecture with panache, and there was infectious power even in her little exaggerations. Comrade Weissberg could have been an excellent saleswoman, Thomas said to himself.

  They went for a walk. The moment they left the map room he felt relief, the visionary film left her eyes, and he hoped that soon he would be able to speak reasonably with her. His mood improved, and in the market he stopped at a stand laden with old things and insisted on buying her a present. She chose an army knife with tweezers and a screwdriver. He gave it to her with a bow: ‘If you please, a gift from the German Foreign Office. Just don’t use it against us.’

  They walked across the bridge and left the city, heading for the woods she wanted to show him. She planned to hold a joint luncheon there for the senior officers of the two armies. Fishermen sat on rocks surrounded by weeds that waved in the wind, boys raced around them and scattered breadcrumbs for the swans, and on the bank across from her a gilded triangle spread and then gathered in the black thicket.

  In the forest the city was only a rumour. There was the rushing of the water, the rustling trees, cawing crows, the gaiety of the birds. He loosened his tie, took off his jacket and hung it over his arm. They walked on rustling leaves, passed under a tunnel of vines bent by the wind, and entered a clearing surrounded by birches and oaks. In the morning the sun was hidden by cloud, but now, towards noon, it was spreading its bright glow. The light plunged into Alexandra Weissberg’s eyes and wove golden strips in their grey gleam. She pointed at the treetops. ‘Look, they’re like lions.’

  ‘A p
oet’s imagination,’ he teased her. ‘From a pointed spire, a bell and a bird, you create architectonic visions.’

  She was proud of their achievements, and he agreed with her, and when he felt she was relaxed he told her that indeed they saw the first stage of the parade eye to eye, but as for the subsequent stages, he was sorry to say that the plan didn’t seem right to him: clinging to history was, in his eyes, merely an empty quotation. What good would the masses derive from these gestures? Unlike Goethe and Croce, he did not believe that knowledge of history was liberating; it shackled us and restricted our imagination. Instead of describing the future, the parade would force the masses to look backwards. And what landscapes did we want to present to them? A pile of mangled corpses, the treaties that were violated? Two years after your great military parade, Napoleon, against whom the emperors had joined forces, reviewed battalions of the French and Russian army with Czar Alexander, and the Russian army helped its former enemy to fight against the Austrian Kaiser, with whom Alexander had surveyed their splendidly arrayed regiments. Nor did that treaty prevent further deaths a few years later with the French invasion.

  ‘Why shouldn’t the parade represent, for example, the history of the movement of merchandise in Europe; we Germans bought some planes from the Americans; other American planes, from the same manufacturers, are now bombing the cities of Germany, and the President of the United States condemns us. But American companies are still trading with us. My father, who worked in the Junkers factory, built planes for you Russians. Advanced models of them might soon kill German boys. Why not show that history in the parade?

  ‘The preoccupation with the past is one huge fixation. History speaks in the primitive language of blood, and it’s abuse of school children to force them to study those horrors. After all, history is at everyone’s service. That’s all well and good, but our parade has to be more elevated. Germany and the Soviet Union stand on the brink. I am sure you know about the forces on the border: four million soldiers on both sides, maybe more. Our goal is to fire everyone’s imagination with the opportunities for peace.’

  While he was speaking, she grew pale, her shoulders sank and her eyes, which had once terrified him, lost focus. She hugged her coat to her body. Then she stiffened, and stared proudly at him.

  ‘I do not mean to belittle your impressive work,’ he said quickly.

  Contempt showed on her face. ‘There’s no need for compliments. We’re here to do the best for our shared purpose. These matters aren’t personal.’

  Indeed, he concurred. They could easily resolve their differences. With her permission, he would like to tell her more about his suggested model of the world’s fair. He had been to the one in Spain, in Seville, and in his opinion, if you hadn’t seen the splendour of the Iberian fair, you’d missed out on the world at its best. He told her about its fabulous artifice, which contrasted with the faded face of Seville, about the Mexican, Brazilian, Portuguese and Guatemalan pavilions. Wandering around there, he felt that he was walking across a map of the world. He couldn’t resist telling her the story about the final Moorish ruler: in 1492, after losing the battle for the last Muslim fortresses on the Iberian peninsula, he had wept in the ship as it sailed away from Granada. His mother reprimanded him: ‘Don’t cry like a woman for a place that you couldn’t defend like a man.’

  ‘When was that fair?’

  ‘In 1929. You must have heard about the other fairs too, which have been held all over the world, in Chicago, New York, Paris.’

  ‘Did you go to the Paris fair?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no.’

  ‘But you’ve been to Paris?’

  ‘Of course! We had an office there.’ Her tone was heartbreaking; she struggled to subdue the longing in her eyes. She was a little girl-woman who had never left the Soviet Union. He cleared his throat. ‘In any case, our peace event should not include military stunts or history. It has to charm the people.’

  Here was his plan: a ring of eight pavilions to be built around Brest; six of them would represent the armed forces—land, air and sea—and he could imagine children climbing on tanks, pressing buttons in cockpits, clambering around a decommissioned warship.

  He leaned wearily against a tree. It felt like the feeling had been cut off in his fingers. This day was exhausting him. The sunlight shattered on the leaves. Grey dust hung in the air, and in some places under the trees the darkness of evening had already fallen.

  ‘You are actually planning a circus,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want a battle of elephants?’

  ‘The details aren’t important,’ he said, ignoring the provocation. ‘I also propose two joint pavilions: one of Germano-Soviet art, and another of peace and fraternity.’

  ‘And what will we exhibit in the pavilion of peace and fraternity?’ she asked.

  ‘What a question!’ he called out in cheerful surprise. ‘Things connected with peace and fraternity.’

  He expected to savour the familiar taste of victory, but he realised that his answer didn’t reflect his thoughts. The clarity of his words had diverted him from his intention: to present his solution to her sincerely. He was struck by the uselessness of his actions—his pattern of behaviour remained set even when his intentions changed; his behaviour preceded his will.

  Had he come to the second meeting and risked what he had risked just to rid himself of the gaze that tortured him? Every morning he had got out of bed to harness all of his abilities, both exalted and contemptible, in service of the parade. This woman was the only other person in the world who believed in it. The problem was that Mademoiselle Weissberg was floating in a dream, hiding in the map room the way his mother and Frau Stein had hidden in the bedroom. He had to bring her back to the world of action. Yet it was hard for him to believe that this young woman would have the courage to be his partner in such a freewheeling plan.

  He heard her saying: ‘I arrive here in a confused state, and here my doubts are resolved. In the forest the grip of external forces is weakened. Here I came to understand that the parade is my fate.’ After a brief silence she added, ‘And I hope that it’s yours, too.’

  An entreaty whose meaning he didn’t understand was woven into her words. When he looked up, the city and the sky had disappeared. The sky was tangled with the foliage, and it was already hard to distinguish between them.

  ‘Gospozha Weissberg, nashi raznoglasya dolzhni bit raznersheni yeshcho svodnya!’* He had decided to surprise her and speak to her in Russian. Maybe French was keeping them apart; the time had come to get closer to the truth. Her face betrayed nothing. Maybe she had read in some report that he spoke Russian. ‘I’ll support any reasonable plan for the parade,’ he went on. ‘In fact, the plan isn’t the main thing. We share a common goal, and we might be the only people in the world who believe in this goal, so we have to do everything we can to attain it. My strong recommendation is that, starting from tomorrow, our only goal is for the parade to win over our Foreign Offices. The date that I propose for the Germano-Soviet parade is 1 July 1941. Does that sound good to you?’

  ‘Herr Heiselberg,’ she answered, and her voice was distant and cold. ‘You’ve acquired a fine Moscow accent. But I have to say that our differences of opinion about the content of the parade are profound and apparently touch upon deep-rooted differences between the nations we represent. I suggest we schedule another meeting to reach a decision. Until then, let’s seek a proposal full of inspiration.’

  She was completely ignoring the urgency of his words. The armour that she had donned was impenetrable.

  ‘We have to present our plans for the parade to our superiors immediately,’ he protested.

  ‘It’s better to present the plans when they’re ready.’

  ‘You understand that by then it might be too late!’ He lost his composure.

  ‘Why do men talk about war all the time? There’s no inspiration in that,’ she said with a facetious expression.

  There it was, the word ‘inspiration’ again,
as if she were labouring over a work of art. ‘Miss Weissberg, we’ll make all the decisions today!’

  ‘How will we do that?’

  ‘How will we do that?’ he asked bitterly. ‘Here’s an example: I accept your entire proposal word for word!’

  ‘Mr Heiselberg, is this a game for you?’ she shouted. Furious wrinkles formed between her eyebrows. ‘Don’t you understand that your capricious behaviour is endangering our entire mission?’

  Between the trees the violet sky showed, spotted with a few stars, like a cracked glass dome. Time was running out. The second parade meeting was about to end, and it was clear that Weissberg’s only goal, the only thing left in her arsenal, was to end on a note of hope.

  ‘Miss Weissberg, I will speak now with the utmost sincerity.’ He had no alternative but to threaten a little. ‘If we don’t decide that within a week we will present our plan for the parade to our superiors, I will have to report to the German Foreign Office that the second parade meeting came to a dead end.’

  ‘You aren’t going to do that,’ she declared. But her eyes showed fear. ‘We have to stay united.’

  They climbed up towards the bridge over the black river. Every step demanded an effort. His breath whistled, and the fatigue he had been combating for the past few hours overwhelmed him. Weak light flashed from the windows of the first houses on the edge of the city, and a flame spiralled up from the saw mill. The bridge sloped down to the bank, but the closer they got to the city, the weaker his body became: they were both small, too small, staggering through the sand like two crabs, here was the city before them, and beyond it other cities—Lublin, Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin—fates were decided there, no one remembered them there. He felt like a little pin that was making oversized dreams dance on its head. He wanted to be among the trees again where the world could not pounce on him. He had lost the confidence that protected him at Milton—the company was a bit like that forest—the confidence that he could predict outcomes and plan his future. How could he have known, for example, that the model he had sketched out in Berlin would be used to eliminate the archaeologists in Warsaw and Lublin? It didn’t matter how much he mocked his feeling of guilt—in his dreams the archaeology class still taunted him. Sometimes they shouted, as befitted the future generation, and sometimes they mourned, as expected of orphans: ‘Teacher Thomas! Remember us, please. We want to see your parade. Orphans like parades too!’