He moved down to the keyboard and let his fingers straggle across the faded ivory keys. Well, it needed tuning. But that was the price of the war, wasn’t it? Everything was slightly off-key these days. The taste of ersatz coffee. The roar of gas-driven cars. The clatter of wooden-soled shoes on the pavements. In Germany, in the towns, people’s skins had even taken on an unlikely orange tinge as a direct result, or so he’d been told, of the chemicals the authorities were secretly using to colour fake butter.
He flipped open the lid of the piano stool. Chopin’s Etudes, the Clementi Sonatas, the Bach Preludes and Fugues, a few Mozart pieces and some Debussy. And what was this? He reached inside the stool and lifted out a stray sheet of paper. A sleeping baby’s head had been delicately sketched on it in charcoal. Underneath the drawing a name had been scribbled in a florid childlike script: PERSEPHONE. A curious name for an infant, when one came to think about it.
He cast his mind back to his schooldays. Hadn’t Persephone been the Queen of the Underworld? The bringer of destruction? Or had it been regeneration? He shook his head in irritation. It had all been so long ago, and his memories were now so inextricably snagged up with debris from the war. What a world he and his generation had inherited: a world in which the mechanics of creation were forced to make way for the mechanics of destruction. It was almost as if the drawing had been left there as a warning.
The sight of such a fine library unavoidably called to mind Father Bauer’s horror when news had first filtered back to Reckingen in 1933 – despite the best efforts of Propaganda Minister Goebbels to minimize the event inside the Reich – of the Nazis burning books.
‘Mann. Feuchtwanger. Zweig. Remarque. They have even burnt Heine. Those monsters will be burning the Bible next. And you, Max, are thinking of joining them?’
‘I shall be eighteen next year. And I have no choice in the matter. My father thinks it is the best thing to do in the circumstances.’
‘In the circumstances. In the circumstances.’ In his irritation, Father Bauer’s hands had fluttered like the wings of a humming-bird, taking in the church, and the altar, and the magnificent stained-glass windows that Max’s family had subvented over the centuries. ‘Heine was right. To leave Germany, I mean. He was not appreciated here. They rejected him, just as they are rejecting him yet again a century later:
I am leaving home with my wife
To journey to another place;
Nothing, though, you do can change
My tasting wisdom’s grace.’
Max had craned his head quizzically to one side. ‘What’s that from? I can’t place it.’
‘What’s that from! You were always cursed with a poor memory, Max. “Adam Der Erste”, of course.’
‘And where did Heine go to?’
‘He went to France. And you should go there too, Max. Towards civilization, and not away from it. Use your family connections. Don’t stay here. Don’t let the Nazis take you over, soul as well as body. Go to the Conservatoire in Paris. Continue your piano studies. It is what you were born for. Not to be a soldier.’
Max shook his head in wonder at Father Bauer’s perspicacity – and at his own inexpedient capacity for folly. How little he had understood himself at that age. And how little he had learned since. He replaced the drawing inside the stool and slammed shut the lid.
It was hardly surprising that he felt so at home in France. Forswearing Rome, which for centuries had marked the location of the von Aschau’s second home, Max’s gaming obsessed great-grandfather, Tasso – the von Aschau’s one and only black sheep – had built himself, in 1842, a majestic villa on the hills overlooking Cannes.
It was to this enchanting place that Max and his family had migrated, via the Brenner Pass and the Col de Sospel, to spend the winter and spring holidays of his formative years. The house he had now so cavalierly requisitioned felt familiar to him, therefore – but awkwardly so. As if it were a coat made by his tailor for a man of a marginally different build, and passed on to him in error.
A violent crashing from outside the room disturbed the tenor of his thoughts. The library door swung open to reveal a sweating red-faced Meyer.
‘Look, Major. Look at this. Real French champagne. And cognac too. And there’s more wine down there than a battalion of navvies could drink on St Lundi’s day.’ Meyer held up two looted magnums.
Max felt unaccountably irritated by Meyer’s sudden intrusion into the realm of his daydreams. ‘We are not going to pillage here, Paul. Anything we take I intend to pay for.’
Meyer stuck out his chin. ‘How’s this place different, then? We didn’t pay the bloody Ivans.’
Max shook his head. ‘I can’t explain it. History, I suppose. The Armistice. We didn’t take this place fighting. We’re just occupying it.’
‘I suppose you’ll want me to put these back then?’ Meyer gazed longingly at the bottles.
‘No, Paul. Take them. I’ll set up a list. You can have those on me. Is the cellar locked?’
Meyer shrugged. ‘It was. It isn’t now. For God’s sake, Major, why don’t you take a drink yourself? You’ve hardly touched a drop since Russia.’
‘Do I look as if I need one?’
Meyer scratched his chin philosophically on the neck of one of the bottles. ‘Everybody needs one now and again.’
* * *
Later that night, before retiring to bed, Max stood naked in front of the full-length mirror in the master bedroom and studied himself.
Would he have recognised the man facing him now aged twenty-eight, if he had been privileged – at eighteen, say – to have had a preview? He hadn’t looked at himself in this way for longer than he cared to remember, and the image he presented unsettled him. He had lost his riding muscles driving around in tanks, and now his thighs were palely slender – like a girl’s almost – and seemingly incapable of carrying him, or so it felt, more than a few paltry kilometres.
He ran his hand across his belly and down over his groin. It had been nearly four years since he had last made love to a woman – virtually the entire length of the war. The last female he had touched (he had trouble even remembering her name) had been a petite young blonde, in awe probably of his lieutenant’s uniform, half hoping she would become pregnant and present the Führer with yet another zealous acolyte. Max had taken brief advantage of her callowness and made love to her – where? And on what leave? He could no longer remember.
On their last day together she had brought him a homemade Zwetschenkuchen, and they had sat eating it with coffee and fresh cream, somewhere on a sunlit terrace. She had cried a little when he had said goodbye, but he had felt only relief – the relief of a mountaineer who takes the wrong path, but catches himself before it is too late, and returns to base camp, swearing that in the future he will always use a compass.
He let his hands wander down the ridges and punctures of his battle scars. Why had he paraded them in front of Bettina like that while he was home on leave? Had it been a furtive boastfulness masquerading as wisdom? Or did he view himself as a sort of walking miracle, a relic whose body parts should have been scattered, long ago, across some alien square of earth, following some useless battle that even the survivors would not remember?
He held up his crucifix and sniffed at the silver, in an echo of a childhood tic that had seen him smell his hands twenty times a day, his fists in a ball, his fingernails turned inwards, until his mother had lost patience with him and forced him, for the course of one endless nightmarish week, to wear gloves. How Hans-Albin had teased him. Bettina had put on gloves in sympathy, though, for a day or two, but had then lost interest or found it inconvenient, or both.
The cross smelled of nothing. All he picked up was the faint scent of a dried-out bar of soap he had discovered tucked away in a distant bathroom and had washed his hands with – Provençal lavender, he suspected, with a hint of vanilla.
He brushed his hands sensuously through his hair, closing his eyes as he did so. How would it feel if
the girl did that, the one in the restaurant? He glanced instinctively towards the bed. He still had a clear mental image of her, making her way through the tables towards him. He remembered the small pert steps she took, the knowing manner in which she had swivelled her hips, left, then right, to avoid the other diners. She was neat, he decided. Yes, that was it. Neat. There was something neat and self-possessed about her, despite, or perhaps because of, the shattered nose.
But then again, she was no doubt married – these peasants always married early, didn’t they? And even if she wasn’t, she had made it abundantly clear that she looked on him as an enemy – a man to be wary of. She had agreed to his terms solely on account of her mother and the mayor, that much was obvious. Perhaps she’d put poison in his food? Spit on it when no one was looking? He couldn’t really blame her. His kind had violated and occupied her country for four long years, and now, very soon, with the help of the British, the Americans and the Russians, they would get their comeuppance. Let Germany be violated in her turn. See how she would like it.
Disgusted at the direction his thoughts were taking, Max threw a towel around his waist and padded downstairs – on through the hall and in the direction of the wine cellar. He pushed open the door and walked in.
Christ. Meyer hadn’t been exaggerating. There were bottles stacked, twelve deep, in more than twenty bins. He pulled one out at random: La Tâche 1929. Then another: Léoville-Las-Cases 1928. Then another: Richebourg 1933. Whoever had lived here had certainly been graced with immaculate taste.
Clutching the bottles to his chest, Max started resolutely back up the stairs.
Paul Meyer
Meyer sighed. He placed the unlit pipe back in the top pocket of his tunic and buttoned it up, crinkling his eyes against the early morning sunlight.
‘All right, Berger. You can go now. But if you mention so much as one word of what you’ve seen here, I’ll slice your balls off, mince them with a parsley chopper, and then feed them to you with a side order of potato dumplings. Do you get my drift?’
‘Yes, Sergeant-Major.’
Berger could hardly control the amused twitching on the right-hand side of his mouth. Major von Aschau was draped over the foot of his bed, stark naked, one arm thrown out behind him as if he had been trying to catch something, missed his footing, and then fallen over backwards and knocked himself out.
Meyer, his eyebrows still raised in warning, watched Berger edge his way out through the door.
‘Do you think the Major will still be wanting his breakfast?’
‘I’ll attend to the Major’s breakfast.’
‘Yes, Sergeant-Major.’
Berger was tempted to say something witty about the Major’s impressive armaments – definitely 122s and not 88s, something along those lines – but he changed his mind when he caught Meyer’s furious gaze. He pulled the door shut behind him. He couldn’t wait to get back to his billet and describe what he had seen. Three bottles. Three whole bottles, the Major had drunk. It was a wonder he hadn’t killed himself. He wasn’t exactly renowned as a heavy toper.
Meyer shook his head. He stood for a long moment looking down at Max, then he gathered the empty bottles together and went in to run a bath. This was what he hated most about the dead periods between actions. People softened. Natural born fighters, like von Aschau, became bored by training, couldn’t think what to do with themselves, then took the road of least resistance. Well, it was he who had suggested the whole thing in the first place, when all was said and done. Max had simply taken him at his word and overcooked the pudding.
He dumped the empty bottles into the wastepaper basket, then straightened up groaning, and rubbed vigorously at his scar. The dumdum bullet had entered his body just above the hipbone, and exited, taking half a pound of flesh and most of one kidney with it, just to the left of his spine. He was absurdly lucky to be alive. Not even crippled, apart from the occasional cramp, like this one, in his scar tissue, when he made an unexpected movement. And all thanks to the fool now lying comatose in the neighbouring bedroom, who had had the balls to tear up the rule book and risk his entire command to come back inside the forest to look for him.
If he was honest with himself, though, Meyer still had trouble remembering exactly what had taken place that night. How he could have been stupid enough, and amateur enough, to lead his men into an ambush. He had always considered himself a good soldier – made for it, really. He had been a forester by profession, a man of the woods, and Russia had constituted, to all intents and purposes, simply an extension of that. The loss of his men rankled, therefore, to the extent that he’d have happily given up his other kidney and spent the remainder of his life wedded to an artificial lung, to have them all safely back home again.
Home. As he stood and watched the bath filling up, Meyer tried, not for the first time, to conjure up a credible picture of his wife, Marta. How she would look after the long years of absence. How she would smell. The sound of her voice. Even the taste of her cooking. But the effort, as usual, proved beyond him. He switched his attention to his son, as he always did during these rare moments of introspection. That was an easier thing to think about altogether.
The boy would be, what, eleven years old now? Please God the war would be over before he reached enlistment age. Meyer shook his head guiltily at his own apostasy – as recently as two years ago, he had been unable to think of anything he craved more than for his son to follow in his footsteps and enter the same regiment.
These last few months, though, since his wounding, he had caught himself regretting, with increasing frequency, not having been allowed the time to teach the boy the things his own father had taught him. Useful unmilitary things – like how to stop a rabbit in its tracks by sucking on the back of your hand and imitating the sound of a weasel; or how to trick a stag with a piece of old clothing, so that he would turn towards you, and not away from you as was his instinct; how to sniggle trout in limpid pools and tell the correct hour by the sun; or how to judge weather by the flight of starlings at nightfall, or when crows sit facing you, with their beaks to the wind. Things like that. Things they didn’t write down in books, but which had to be passed on verbally from generation to generation.
Meyer clearly remembered his own father teaching him how to shoot – how he was to hold his breath, creating a vacuum inside his head, and then fix the image of the game inside the vacuum as he released his breath and shot. Later, he had used the same technique when targeting men on the battlefield, and it had rarely failed him. There was something supernatural about the technique – something almost mystical, Meyer felt – as if it had slipped through God’s net and seeded itself willy-nilly inside men’s minds.
For in his heart of hearts, Meyer was firmly convinced that soldiers knew when they were about to die – that some instinct warned them, the split second before the bullet was actually fired, linking them, in an intimate lover’s knot, to their executioner. He had felt exactly this, that time at the edge of the clearing. But some residue in him had not wished to die, and he had launched himself forwards, meeting the bullet as it came towards him, and this instinct, he now felt, had saved his life – this forester’s instinct, culled from the dark glades, shot through with shafts of sunlight, which constituted his real inheritance from his father.
He closed off the taps and moved wearily back into the bedroom. The major hadn’t stirred. Meyer squatted down beside him and began to exert a steady pressure on Max’s earlobe, just as he had learned to do on the Russian front to avoid men calling out in anxiety as they awoke.
Max grumbled and tried to throw his arm forward, but it was either so stiff from its prolonged positioning, or he was still so weak from the effects of the wine, that nothing happened.
Meyer placed his hand on Max’s forehead, testing for fever, and then, in a surprisingly paternal motion, he brushed back his hair. Grabbing Max by the shoulders, he hoisted him to his feet, silently cursing the weakness in his damaged side. Max twisted forwar
ds and made as if to fall in a dead weight back onto the mattress, but Meyer steered him skilfully towards the bathroom and the tub of cold water.
‘In you go now. Come on, Major. That’s right. Now the other leg.’
‘Scheisse!’
Max tried to raise one foot from the icy water, but only succeeded in falling backwards, a movement Meyer encouraged. Still thrashing, Max slid underneath the bath water, his feet emerging at the other end, propelled by the smooth enamel, until his head and body were entirely submerged and his toes jammed up against the far wall.
Meyer raised Max’s head just before he drowned, and left him there, wallowing, amidst a sea of oaths and plashing bathwater.
‘I’m making coffee. I shall be back in ten minutes. You’ll be all right now, I’m thinking.’
Preparation
Lucie took a sip from her steaming bowl of acorn coffee, one eye fixed apprehensively on her mother as she bustled about the kitchen.
‘But Maman, I should help…’
‘Stay where you are. This is the German’s first lunch I am producing, and I want it to be good. You’ll have more than enough to do heating it up, serving him, then hovering in the kitchen while he eats. Afterwards, you’ll wash up the plates, rescue our pots and pans, and tell me how he liked it. Exactly what he said, down to the last word. I’m still working out how best we can use him. I want him to need us more than we need him.’
‘But what about the restaurant?’
‘I’ve taken on Idiot Lise for the next few weeks. Her mother’s only too grateful for the extra sous. She and I can manage perfectly well between us. We’ll more than earn back her wages from what I charge him for lunch and for your services.’
‘You’re charging him for me?’ Lucie set the bowl awkwardly back on the table, nearly upsetting its contents.
‘For your time, of course. His servant surely doesn’t know how to cook. And there are things to arrange that only a cook understands.’ Jeanne Léré fastened on her apron and pinned back her hair. ‘And while he’s busy gorging himself, try and snaffle a bottle or two of Hermitage from the de Joinville’s cellar. They won’t notice it’s gone, or will be too ashamed to mention it when they slink back from their bolthole in Nouvelle Calédonie, once the war is over.’
The Occupation Secret Page 11
