The Losing Role

by Steve Anderson

  “Fine.” Max just wanted clear of this place.

  “Far as opposition goes, we’ll just have to take that MP’s word for it.”

  “I believed him. What did he have left to lie about?”

  They would have to travel with the top down, since the jeep’s canvas top was shredded. As an enlisted man, Felix would drive. The jeep did not start. They opened the hood and stared at the engine twice, for minutes on end, before realizing Zoock had somehow removed the distributor cap. He’d placed it neatly on top of the engine block.

  Felix started up the jeep and, wrestling with the clutch, steered them off the road and on through the gaps between the trees. They drove through the woods to skirt the town, bouncing and bumping shoulders, Max grasping at the windshield frame. As twilight came a light fog set on the gullies and puddles. They passed through an area hit hardest by the bombardments, a wasteland of splintered stumps and black craters. The snowy earth had been churned up to resemble salt and pepper. Toppled trees covered foxholes, trenches, sandbagged artillery dugouts and timbered command posts. It was like a garbage dump. Emptied crates, spent shells, sandbags and satchels and helmets lay strewn about. Legs and hands pointed to the sky, frozen. They heard no cries for help, for the cold had taken care of those left whimpering.

  The MP corporal spoke the truth. This sector was a forgotten land.

  The mess created a labyrinth for Felix, and he steered them through in the lowest gear. Felix drifted into intense thought. His eyes seemed to stop blinking. He cleared the woods and found a road but still the journey was slow going. Patches of ice spun the wheels. Felled logs and charred vehicles clogged their path.

  In two hours they traveled no more than ten miles. Darkness fell. The wind had picked up. It was snowing again. They stopped at a fire-scorched house with half a roof and a fallen wall. Felix backed the jeep inside. Stiffly they climbed out, and Max’s joints ached and popped. One room still had a bed over in a dark corner. Max stretched out on it. Such cushy stillness was a divine luxury.

  Felix joined him. He’d brought cans of American rations over. They sat up, their backs against the soft upholstered headboard.

  Felix handed Max a Lucky Strike. Max just stared at it. “Why kill him?” he said.

  “Who? Hartmut? You heard that MP—said Amis never travel four to a jeep. Not even three. That made us at least two too many. There’s also the sad fact that he was going to get us nabbed before we could do some real damage. I told you. He was in the way.”

  “You’ve been planning this.”

  Felix lit his Lucky. His voice softened. “And you? You, Zoock, me—I guess we’ve all been planning.”

  Max said nothing.

  “When we rode behind those German prisoners you said: ‘I don’t want them giving me away’—meaning only you. I remember that clearly.”

  “You have a keen memory. Congratulations.” Max lifted an imaginary champagne glass. “Back to Rattner. I suppose there are many men to keep company with. Why him?”

  Fritz shrugged. “He came to me. I didn’t make him. Unfortunately, he was also a bastard. I’m telling you, sorry dogs like him will be hopeless in the New Germany.”

  “New Germany—you mean after all this? We’ll be lucky if there’s any after,” Max said.

  They opened their ration cans and shoved the cold bland beans into their mouths. Then they reclined and lay back, staring up through the gaps in the roof at passing clouds. “There will be a new Germany, and it might just be the best thing that ever happened to you,” Felix said. “Did you ever think of that, my von Kaspar? Eh? You could recreate yourself. We all could. So you shouldn’t fear the big change. Change is grand.”

  Had Max heard noises? He’d been sleeping. His eyes had popped open but he saw nothing. Where was he? On the bed. Still in the house. His eyes adjusted, and he saw Felix’s silhouette in the dark, the glow of his cigarette moving up and down. He was standing over at the jeep.

  “I was sleeping,” Max said.

  “Yes. Snoring, too.”

  “How long did I sleep?”

  “Hour, maybe.”

  “What are you doing over there?”

  Felix sighed. He trudged over to the bed, sat, and slumped. He began to speak, but his voice creaked. He tried again: “You know, I assumed that batty redhead sailor would stick around for the bitter end. He was going to come in handy.”

  “No. Zoock, he had it all planned out, right down to his silly accent. He wasn’t losing marbles. That was just a ruse to throw off anyone who tried to track him down. Probably dyed that red hair already. I would have.”

  Max got up and wetted his face with cold canteen water, jolting himself awake, and the events of that afternoon came hurtling back. They had killed two American soldiers at close range. Max let the only witness get away. Then they’d interrogated and lynched their helpless prisoner. Max imagined the corpses hardening under the snow—those two young black MPs, their freckled leader, and even Captain Rattner, none more alive than carcasses hanging in a butcher’s freezer. His little brother Harry had freckles, Max remembered.

  Zoock was the smart one. The sailor had his one shot and he took it. He’d probably watched from behind trees as Max and Felix sped away through the woods. Soon, Max imagined, Zoock would hole up with some café owner’s daughter, tell her he was an Américain déserteur. They’d share a wondrous night together. In the morning, he’d hitch a ride to the Meuse and on to Paris, where he’d make a good go of it and earn enough for a new identity—then a one-way ticket on an ocean liner. South America was an option. Maybe by then the war would be over. It was all just as Maximilian von Kaspar would have done. Yet von Kaspar was gone to Max now. His days in theater were dead and he could never bring them back. Passion itself was a pipe dream, a shot in the dark. He was being dehumanized—entmenschlicht. The only truth he knew was it was 7 o’clock in the evening on December 17, 1944, and outside the snow was dumping down and piling up. He was mechanical. He was entseelt—deprived of soul. He ran with goddamned murderers.

  His eyes burned. A tear dropped on his thumb and he shook it off, sniffling. He dropped back down on the bed.

  Beside him, Felix was sitting forward as if praying. “America, she chewed me up,” he said.

  “Say again?” Max wiped at his eyes.

  “America chewed me up, and I hated America for that. Yes.” Felix’s voice gained clarity as if he were reading aloud to schoolchildren. He said, “And so I hated her for her ignorance, her piety, and her seediness, for her wild optimism, for her dog-eat-dog cruelty. And yet, I didn’t hate Americans for what they are; I hated them for not shining even more than they do, and can. They can be so much more. You see, Kaspar?” Max nodded, why not. “Their potential is unlimited,” Felix continued, “But they squander it. They could be supermen. Egyptians. Greeks. Romans. Conquerors.”

  Horse shit. That was the last thing the world needed. Max nodded anyway. “They are perfect for the part. But they don’t get the role,” he muttered.

  “In truth? You want the truth? I was hating them for all the ways they’re really too like me. Like us. By hating them, I was really hating myself—for holding back. Now I’m not holding back. You want to know why I fight on. Why I chant the slogans. Call for blood and victory. It’s got nothing to do with Americans, or the Brits, the mongrel Reds invading from the East. National Socialism? That’s just a banner. It could be any banner as long as it promised something . . .” Felix paused. “Max, sometimes I think I must be from another age. I want something nobler. Bolder. Not better. Not even idealistic, in the good sense. Just more, let us say, romantic.”

  Ruthless and primitive, were the words that came to Max. “That can be a bitter pill,” he said.

  “I’m not saying we’re alike, mind you. While you were striving to be this cultured thespian of fine repute, there I was wasting away in the seediest clubs and cabarets—joints so degenerate, they easily survived the Nazi takeover.” Felix snickered. “Now, with our
Berlin-Rome burning, I suspect the old haunts are thriving.”

  They sat in silence. “America chewed me up, too,” Max said finally. “Spit me out, as a matter of fact.”

  Fifteen

  New York City, 1937. Over three years gone here and still in limbo. At least Max had Lucy Cage. They ice skated at the new Rockefeller Center. They picnicked in Central Park. Sure, these were the jaunts for tourists but they held such charm when he did them with her. (Why did the best memories always include women?) He’d go to her apartment after working late, and she’d be waiting up for him, keeping the bed warm, sprawled out on her back with one arm up close to her head as if she were waving. She called him Maxie. He called her Luce. She made him chew gum with her. She made him feel a part of this city. Instead of the din of cabs and sirens, he noticed the dew glistening on stoops and the toothy smiles of the shoeshine men, and how the steam danced and twirled from sewer grates.

  Lucy was a model for advertisements. Cigarettes. Ice cream. You name it, she said. Once Max looked up on Fifth Avenue and saw her giant face nuzzling a giant pillow, two stories up and three stories tall, he couldn’t even remember the ad it was so stunning. The gig went like this—she posed for an artist who drew her and painted in the color later. Sometimes they just took a photo and that was it, a half hour’s work. She liked that best—the speed and convenience of it. Art was not a factor. Ambition barely played a role. It was just for the money. To her it was just a job.

  Lucy got rejected lots of times. She just shrugged it off. How can you do that? Max wondered. In Europe we show the emotion, he told her.

  “Apparently, you show it here too,” she said.

  “All you got to do is adjust,” she said.

  “Adjust, adjust—it’s easy when you’re born here. You can’t adjust an accent.” How many times had he ranted about this? It was the only thing they fought about. One time he threw a plate at the wall, and then a coffee cup. And why not? His whole block seemed to do it nightly.

  And still the roles never came. His new agent was little help. Constantly he complained about the émigrés’ stilted style. “Big European names, they said—sure, but the salt water it seemed to shrink ‘em.”

  The only thing stopping Max was his accent. If he could fix that, all else would follow.

  His new agent was skeptical. “The accent, it’s got to be near perfect if you want to break out,” he said. “Mocking is one thing. To be is another.”

  Max could be whatever he wanted, he decided. He went to the cheap matinees and watched the same films over and over, attuning himself to the American English sounds. Often he sat alone in the top corner of the balcony and sounded out the words. At home he repeated Lucy’s sentences until they were dead on.

  Lucy kidded him, “Honey, you don’t want to sound like me. Who wants to see a German saying ‘says you’ and ‘big lug.’ It ain’t right, you know? Got no class.”

  In America, class was only how wealthy you were. Heritage and profession played little role. He had to prove himself anew every day. Meanwhile, he had to eat, and it wasn’t getting any easier. He had many jobs:

  Funny waiter.

  House servant.

  Clothing factory—cutting buttonholes and pressing garments.

  Guard in an insane asylum, of all things.

  He could keep few of them. The funny waiter was in a club that still had vaudeville acts. He was expected to fall and spill on himself to get the customers laughing. He got the laughs, but they wanted him to wear an Imperial German helmet with a spike on top and a large Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. It was the only job he quit. The clothing factory job was tough. The steam and heat made his skin pink and tender all over, and the sewing machines made such a racket his ears rang. They told him not to come back one day. “My cousin needs a job,” said the foreman, “and, well, you know how it is?” The strangest job was the asylum. It was an overnight shift. The hulking head nurse mistook him for one of the inmates once, and that was that.

  Meanwhile, the émigrés were pouring in from a troubled Europe—more leftists and Jews from Germany and Austria, Italy and Spain. The more recent the arrival, the more bitter their take on the future. Many mistrusted Max. What was he doing here anyway, a gentile German? Some considered him an agent of the Gestapo, or in the least somewhat cracked in the head. Didn’t he know there was a war looming?

  Other émigrés talked of killing themselves. The writers were the worst. The older ones were serious about it. Max knew a middle-aged couple from Vienna who jumped together from their shabby apartment. She had a PhD. He’d won prizes for literature. Neighbors found them smashed into the roof of a Packard, still holding hands.

  Nevertheless, Max’s American English was improving. He’d lost the ach and bitte and Mein Gott, mastered the “th” and “w,” and adopted a refined, Mid-Atlantic intonation that all the better actors were doing. Lucy told him so. “Oh Maxie, you sound so like Claude Rains. It’s dreamy to be sure.”

  It was too late. The summer of 1939 was approaching and the scene was set—Germans in America were either bad Nazis or hopeless Jews. Max didn’t look like a Jew. “So play a general or a spy,” his agent told him, “that’s the way it’s been and the way it’s gonna be for a while. Except in Hollywood. It has to be in Hollywood, Max.”

  Max stood his ground. New York City was the reason he came, and Lucy Cage was the reason he was staying. What else was there? He still had a hovel of an apartment on the Lower East Side, a small rectangle five stories up with one window facing the inner courtyard. Children cried nonstop. The elevated trains rumbled and clicked. To tell the weather he had to stick his head out the window and look up through the iron steps and railings of the fire escape. How many rides home had he declined so people wouldn’t have to see how he lived?

  One day, Lucy Cage picked up and left. She left Max this note:

  I’m heading to California, Maxie. I’ll be getting more work there, and you can bet I’ll be seeing more sunshine. I’m sorry. I wish it could have worked out better for us, you know?

  Love,

  Your Luce

  She might have been sorry, but she didn’t even leave an address.

  For weeks, then months, Max slept well into the day. He stopped looking for roles and started drinking rye whiskey like the tough guys did in the movies. Once he passed a prostitute who resembled his Luce and considered paying her to call him Maxie in her New York accent. But rye was overrated and so was sleeping late. One day, he began to snap out of it.

  He didn’t belong anywhere, but he was from somewhere. Was going back to Germany such a bad thing? After all, he was a German. So what if Germany was fascist? Many Americans admired fascism. Businessmen told him the fascist movement seemed a prudent and dynamic product of the modern age. Besides, who could appreciate the trains running on time better than an American? What better mirror of the efficient corporation than the resolute fascist state? Who else better represented the bold and decisive fascist leader than George Washington himself? Lots of Americans seemed to think so. Fritz Kuhn and the German American Bund thought so—they held a rally that filled Madison Square Garden, and who else should preside three stories high on the stage backdrop, between the stars and stripes and swastika, than that primeval All-American who could not tell a lie? For a time, American Nazism was more of an evolutionary certainty than many would care to admit by 1939.

  Max was not political. He never had been. He was only seeing things for what they were, and the way things were going in Europe, he might not have another chance in a long time to make the jump. Hitler had annexed Austria. Then, he’d gone back on his word and taken all of Czechoslovakia even though he’d promised England and France he’d do no such thing. Max didn’t blame Hitler for this. Of course, the little Austrian would overdo things in his first years of power. That was the way power worked, at first. Then he’d drink his tea and calm down.

  Meanwhile, Max’s auditions had dwindled to none. Hollywood wasn’t an option anymore
either, his agent told him on their last meeting—the place was now full of German speakers playing bad Nazis. Then his agent left town and hit California himself.

  Max shrugged it off, best he could. He began talking to women again. A string of dime-a-dance gals kept him amused. He got a job as an elevator operator in a bank building. He heard American accents all day and perfected his American English in a frenzied rush.

  In the back of his mind, he knew he was going back—and it wasn’t back to Manchester. Überall ist es besser, wo wir nicht sind—“the grass is always greener,” went the old saying in English.

  One day an upper-class German man entered his elevator, and they struck up a conversation. The man said he was from the German embassy—a cultural attaché, he said. He invited Max to a nearby bar, and one drink became three.

  Max was privileged this way, he knew. Most émigrés couldn’t and wouldn’t talk to embassy people. It felt nice to enjoy privilege. Max told the man everything. He loved America but it didn’t love him back. He might have made a big mistake.

  The man twirled the whisky in his glass and held it to his chest. He stared at Max a long while, peering into Max until the whisky was motionless, a straight brown line parallel to his manicured fingers. “In that case, you’d have to go back before it was too late,” the man said. “Wouldn’t you? And what’s stopping you? The Jews had ruled German show business, and now they’ve all left. There’s a great hole there. An opportunity. Think about it. You go back, make a real name for yourself. Return a hero to America someday if you like. This is the way to do it. So you think about that, Herr von Kaspar—or simply Kaspar if you like.”

  “I like. Maybe I like.”

  The man from the embassy frequented Max’s elevator many times over the next weeks. The embassy would even cover Max’s fare, the man told him. It was the least they could do for the serious-minded artist who appreciated the aesthetic opportunities in the new Fatherland.