The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  He said something to Kaufer while gesturing back out into the hallway. There was a clicking of heels and the clinking of spurs on the stone floor as the officers followed Bessler out of the sun parlor.

  —The Oberstleutnant would like to offer you some refreshments in the dining room, said Kaufer.

  They came into a long room with an enormous fireplace and a wall of lead-framed windows that overlooked a garden in high, white bloom. The table could seat twenty in ladder-backed chairs, but Bessler gestured to one end, where a half-eaten smorgasbord was laid out.

  —I hope you don’t mind, but we had a little nibble before you came down.

  —Your English is just fine, said Claude, sitting down.

  —And yours! said Bessler, to a hearty round of laughter. For an American.

  —There is the matter of my things. My suitcase, my equipment …

  Bessler spoke in German to Kaufer, who took a seat beside Claude.

  —Everything has been carefully safeguarded and put into a room for you to inspect after we eat.

  * * *

  The table was laid out with hunks of rye bread, wedges of cheese, sliced apple, three bottles of schnapps. A Flemish woman appeared in the doorway, eyes down, carrying a pot of stew to the table. She ladled it into ceramic bowls and silently handed them around to the officers, Bessler first. Claude was the last to be served. Kaufer translated Bessler’s remarks:

  —Gentlemen, this may be the last time we eat oxtail stew that is not from a can. The war will have its deprivations, but Paris is not far off. Let us raise a glass to the motherland and the Kaiser!

  * * *

  They all raised a glass except for Claude, who continued to eat. The stew tasted strongly of onions but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a meal. How long had he been lying upstairs? The Germans ate up, dipping hunks of rye bread into their bowls and shooting back tiny glasses of schnapps. Kaufer translated between mouthfuls.

  —The army unit that swept through here on their way to Louvain was a little overzealous. They removed all the copper pipes and kettles, for example, from the nearby brewery. They almost stripped out the château’s pipes, its plumbing, before I put a stop to things. They mean well, because the metal is taken back to a German foundry for weapons, but I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot …

  At first, Kaufer translated it as the wrong shoe, but then he corrected himself. Claude took a sip of schnapps and it burned his throat.

  —War is a series of misunderstandings, if you ask me, Mr. Ballard.

  —So far, America agrees with you.

  * * *

  They ate for a few moments without talking. Then Bessler puckered between mouthfuls, chewed around the edges of a question.

  —Tell me, how did you come to work for the German newspapers?

  —I’m an American, but my mother was Austrian. I got the job through family connections. They were looking for someone to make photographs and reels, to take a neutral position.

  —And you grew up in America?

  —We traveled a lot for my father’s business. But New Jersey has been home for some time.

  Bessler nodded.

  —Years ago I was in charge of the German Federation of Tourism Agencies, in Berlin, and I entertained journalists from all over the world. We hosted Africans and Slovaks and Australians. I like to think I have an ear for accents, but yours has me stumped. It is a soupy mess, if you don’t mind my saying so. A big vat of goulash!

  The officers laughed at Kaufer’s alternate translations—messy broth, jumbled stew, soupy mess, vat of goulash.

  —Accents are funny things, said Claude.

  He tried to be conscious of his francophone vowels, the way Hal had instructed him to rectify them in the front of his mouth. What had become of Chip and Hal in the aftermath of the hillside fighting? Bessler perched a hunk of cheese onto a stub of rye bread.

  —You don’t speak German, even though your mother was Austrian?

  He inspected the bread from multiple angles before settling on a corner to bite.

  —Barely a word. Nacht and bitte are about the extent of it.

  Bessler chewed into a faint smile.

  * * *

  When the meal was over, Kaufer and Bessler led Claude down the hallway while the other officers went outside to smoke cigars. In what looked like a medieval armory—a stone floor with wall sconces, hanging chain mail, and a long wooden table—his suitcase and its contents had been laid out and sorted: the Aeroscope, the cinématographe, the Graflex, the Pathé, the reels, the first aid kit, the opened notebook, all of its pages written in French. The silk lining of the suitcase lid, where he’d carefully sewn in his French passport, had been sliced open. Both his passports—French and American—were neatly arranged beside the suitcase.

  * * *

  Bessler folded his arms and circled the table, picking up an item then carefully placing it back on the table.

  —Perhaps your father was French? Ballard is quite Gallic, if you ask me. And you appear to write in French fluently.

  —We spent time in France for his business. I went to school a few years there.

  —I see. Where in France?

  —Alsace-Lorraine.

  —Ah, then, practically a part of Germany anyway. Nationality is a complicated matter, don’t you agree?

  —I should probably check in with the American consulate in Brussels. So they know I am safe.

  —Yes, especially since the French consulate has been closed.

  Bessler let his spurs scrape on the stone floor—a knife blade on whetstone—before giving Kaufer a chuffed, satisfied smile. He looked like a man who has just finished dressing a Christmas tree.

  —As it happens, we have already contacted the authorities to make certain enquiries. Just to verify your status. We cannot be too careful with spies roaming around the countryside. Are your cameras in working order?

  Claude picked up the dented Aeroscope and looked through the viewfinder.

  —This one looks to be damaged, but I’ll have to check the others.

  * * *

  Bessler took out a cigarette from a tin case he carried in his breast pocket. He offered one to Claude and lit it for him. As long as the reels are in metal canisters, Claude thought, the nitrates will be safe. Kaufer took a step back, translating but out of their field of vision.

  —I am a great admirer of American films … We are slowly coming around to this kind of art in Germany, but for now my friends in the General Staff of the army are hesitant. They want to make propaganda films that are nothing but iron eagles and unfurling flags. If we want to win over the American mind and heart, I believe we must appeal to their love of entertainment.

  He circled the table, one hand along the edge.

  —To this end, we are setting up a film company in New York, which will handle distribution. There is even talk of buying a small chain of theaters. I wonder if you might consider being our cameraman on the frontlines, to see this war from a German vantage point. Some films will be for the American market and some for Germany, for the men who stoke the fires. Would you consider our invitation? After all, you have had quite the American film career already. You understand the moviegoer from Manhattan to Maine.

  Bessler grinned, delighted with his phrasing. Claude looked out the window where the German officers were standing on the flagstone patio, sending up filaments of cigar smoke under a canopy of trees.

  —You know my work?

  —You are far too modest to introduce yourself as a German newspaperman. We’ve been lucky enough to see some of the Bender & Ballard films back in Berlin. And even though my colleagues would criticize such a stance, I am still a fan of Sabine Montrose. They all think she is a symbol of French hedonism.

  Bessler let out a smoky breath.

  —But, if you ask me, Claude Ballard, art is art, wherever it blooms.

  Claude looked again at the open suitcase, his life emptied and arranged.

  �
�In the short term, we will need to send your photographs and footage to Berlin for developing, but soon enough we will set you up with your own laboratory. I wonder if you might inspect all of your equipment to make sure it’s in working order. And don’t worry about extra film. Rest assured, we have brought plenty of that with us. Tomorrow, we will go into Louvain for our first shooting expedition.

  Bessler picked up the two passports and tapped them on the edge of the table.

  —And I will hold on to these for safekeeping. Very well, we will leave you to it. Kaufer will be just outside in the hallway should you need anything.

  Bessler turned, took a step, then came back.

  —Oh, and if you know your prescription, we will arrange to have new spectacles made for you. We can’t have you be the eyes of the German people unless you can see without impairment.

  * * *

  Claude was surprised by how calm he felt in the armory, alone with his cameras. Something had dropped away in the Belgian woods, the rotating shutter of death so close at hand, so that the idea of being held captive, of being shuttled through the German hinterland of war, seemed almost impersonal, an event wired in from afar. He realized he no longer cared what happened to him. The ache and anger over Sabine also seemed distant, abstract, as if he’d closed the pages of a wearying novel. He asked Kaufer to fetch him some dusting cloths and a work lamp and hunched over the long table.

  * * *

  It comforted him to disassemble and clean the cameras one mechanism at a time. The inside of a camera or projector had always been a sanctuary of mechanical logic, the gears and sprockets and chambers like the workings of a clock. Time could be parsed by a second hand or by light exposure, the present calibrating into the past, and he liked to think he had some control over its passage with a pair of needle-nose pliers in hand, straightening a set of metal teeth or loosening the tension in a wheel. If the tension wasn’t right, if something wobbled, then it was written into the frame. If a speck of dust or grit or a thumbprint attached itself to the meniscus of the lens then everything was lost.

  * * *

  The Pathé, Graflex, and cinématographe were sturdy designs and had come through relatively unscathed, but the Aeroscope had been dropped in the woods. Its lens mounting had detached, allowing light to seep into the main chamber. When he opened the side gate he already knew the footage of the hillside bombardment had been exposed and ruined. There was, perhaps, a way to solder the lens in place and seal the inside with tape, but he found himself extracting the film and using the brass air pump to refill the auto-wind feature. He listened to the quiet pneumatic hissing, watched the sprockets and spools turn. Then something occurred to him from deep within this mechanical reverie.

  * * *

  He remembered the trick cameras in the Manhattan camera supply store, Appleton’s, the way Cora had been fascinated with the Photoret, the pocket watch camera for private detectives, with its tiny discs of celluloid, and the Minigraph, which rolled film automatically, powered by compressed air, and fit into the palm of your hand. It was, essentially, an Aeroscope built at one tenth the scale.

  * * *

  Claude didn’t have a way to scale down the workings of the Aeroscope, but it occurred to him that he had a way to hide them inside the chamber of the big wooden Graflex. He opened the larger camera and began to take measurements. If he drilled a small hole in the bottom corner of the front faceplate, he could position the Aeroscope lens and gears behind it, snug beneath the nonmoving parts. He could coil the small tube where the compressed air fed from the hand pump inside, visible only if the camera was fully open. A small lever on the bottom could release the air so that the mechanisms could move within, without any hand-cranking. A Trojan horse camera, an eye within an eye. It would allow him to film things the Germans didn’t want him to capture.

  * * *

  When Kaufer came to check on his progress several hours later, Claude told him the Aeroscope was ruined, but he could use it for spare parts.

  —The others still need some work. A few more hours.

  The lance corporal went to resume his hallway post. From outside the door, he said:

  —Do not stay up all night. The Oberstleutnant wants you well rested for our big day of shooting tomorrow.

  25

  The Sack of Louvain

  For a week they made filming expeditions into Louvain. Bessler provided Claude with new glasses and a uniform, something to set him apart and underscore his ambiguous nationality—an American army shirt, a pair of British riding breeches, French puttees, and a blue Highlander’s forage cap. The suitcase stayed back at the château, but he carried a tripod, spare film, and two cameras—the Pathé in hand and the modified Graflex strapped to his side, big as a parlor phonograph.

  * * *

  As they drove the Opel staff car into Louvain each day, Claude saw that the roadways were full of fleeing villagers. He couldn’t film them without being noticed but he made a point of remembering certain images. Men trundling wheelbarrows with infants aboard, old women hobbling along with bread and potatoes in pillowcases. A young barefoot girl in her nightgown carrying a canary in a wire cage.

  * * *

  In the city, the gothic university smoldered, its library transformed into catacombs of plaster and rubble. Thousands of volumes had been plundered and lit on fire, so that the streets blew with the papery embers of medieval texts and nineteenth-century novels, with ashen leaves of cryptic prose.

  * * *

  Claude took his direction about what to film from Bessler, who moved about the smoking ruins and shuttered storefronts like Cecil B. DeMille on the set of an epic, a tin whistle around his neck on a silver chain. He would ask a group of clean-shaven infantrymen to pose in front of a decimated church or beside a goulash cannon, briefly frame the scene between his hands, then instruct Claude to begin filming, first with the motion picture camera, then with the still. Perhaps you can angle up to get the Kaiser’s flag flapping from the bell tower as well, Mr. Ballard, so we get a sense of the scaling. His stage directions came through Lance Corporal Kaufer, complete with the interpreter’s own errors, omissions, and misunderstandings. How does it look like in the fotoapparat? Is the light vexing?

  * * *

  While Bessler and Kaufer scouted out the next location and scene, Claude kept his finger on the small lever he’d fashioned at the bottom of the Graflex, spooling the second camera within. He could keep the box camera by his side, at waist-height, looking in the other direction, while the Aeroscope sprockets laced through the perforations in the celluloid. It wasn’t soundless, but there was enough atmospheric noise—distant ordinance, the singing of soldiers, the revving of touring cars—that it went unnoticed. In this way, he captured corpses of women and children mutilated by bayonets, a dozen Jesuit priests made to line up naked against a yellow sandstone wall, a ditch filled with dead horses, a mountain of smoldering books.

  * * *

  Since he barely looked at these images while he was filming them, it was only back at the château that they scoured through him. He’d been allowed to convert a small pantry adjacent to the armory into a darkroom with a red safelight. After he sealed the film stock bound for the official lab in Berlin, he removed the Aeroscope reel and placed it into a canister. Since Bessler and Kaufer wouldn’t risk exposing propaganda footage by opening the darkroom door, Claude knew he had time to secure a good hiding place. He moved the mat that stood at the entrance to the pantry, pried up three floorboards, and placed the canister below. As long as he was careful and Bessler didn’t count the linear feet of celluloid, he could perhaps keep aside ten percent of the film he was given for the Trojan camera.

  * * *

  He sat cross-legged on the pantry floor, bathed in the phosphorous atmosphere of the safelight, the day’s plunder falling through him. Across one dead woman’s chest an infantryman had carved his initials. And there was a field of human limbs and Belgian blue cloth back behind the cathedral. When he closed
his eyes, he felt the stranger breathing inside, the silent witness and cataloguer from the woods.

  * * *

  Bessler insisted that Claude eat dinner with the officers in the main dining room every night, his motley uniform a source of tableside amusement. They ate beef from a nearby farm and whatever vegetables the Belgian cook could pull from the garden. After dinner, they asked Claude to show some reels with his cinématographe, and he was surprised to find that it was the falling cat that delighted the Germans the most, the veracity of a cat landing on its feet from a height.

  * * *

  One night, after a piano concert and a screening, Bessler invited the men to gather around the field telephone in the parlor. He took the receiver from a young private and waited, one eye closed. My orderly has just made the connection with Berlin … ah, quiet please, here we are! Claude stood off to one side, expecting a speech to come through from a general or high commander, but instead came the sound of a man’s baritone voice reciting Goethe. He couldn’t understand more than a few lines, porting them from German to French, but then Kaufer dutifully laid them out in English: The dust rises, in the middle of the night … no, in lower, in deep night … when on the narrow bridge … The traveler shivers … or trembles. I hear you, when with a dull roar, the wave is rising. In the quiet grove I often go to listen when all is silent …

  * * *

  The connection dropped before the recital could finish, which brought a pained expression to Bessler’s face. The orderly offered to try again, but the Oberstleutnant waved him off and kept repeating tiefer Nacht, deep night, as he surveyed the gently drunk men before him. Gentlemen, Antwerp awaits. Very soon, it will be time to cross that narrow bridge. He said good night to them all, put one hand on the scabbard of his dress sword, and retired for the evening. He’d claimed the ornate guest bedroom in the stone tower of the château, the bedroom where, according to the housemaid, Franz Liszt had once slept and written a symphonic poem.