by Craig Nova
“Oh, darling,” said her mother.
“Darling,” said Gaelle. She closed her eyes and swallowed.
The scar was against her mother’s thighs, and Gaelle pushed against them as though those legs could make the scar disappear, that the touch of them could somehow erase it, or at least stop the numb sense of it.
“I’m a little worried,” said Gaelle.
“We’re all worried,” said her mother. “The slump. People out of work. Why, your father is lucky to have a job.”
“I know,” said Gaelle. “But it’s not that kind of worry.”
“Well, what kind is it?”
Gaelle shook her head.
“It’s like a silence,” said Gaelle. “Like what you said. I’ve been thinking of the time before I was born. That was dark, wasn’t it?”
“I guess,” said her mother. “But it was coming toward the light.”
“That’s right,” said Gaelle. “Going toward the light.”
“You could come here,” said her mother. “We could protect you.”
Gaelle listened to the clock tick and glanced at the teacups, which steamed on the table.
“I don’t think so,” said Gaelle.
“It would be fine,” said her mother.
“And we’d sit here and you’d have to look at me,” said Gaelle. “But I don’t mind looking at you,” said her mother. “I love you.”
“My face has changed things,” said Gaelle.
“No it hasn’t,” said her mother. “I don’t mind looking at you.”
“But I mind,” said Gaelle. “It’s like a gas or something I bring into the room. Everyone looks away from me. If they could just look at me once.”
They listened to the clock.
“Please,” said her mother. “You could have your room. We’ve kept it for you.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want that.”
“Don’t want what?” said her mother.
“To be seen,” she said.
They sat for a while, Gaelle so still it appeared she was asleep. The silence of the apartment surrounded them like the most smooth black silk.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” said Gaelle.
“Yes, you should,” said her mother.
Gaelle shook her head.
“It’s your home,” said her mother.
“No,” said Gaelle. “Not anymore.”
“Why don’t you come back?” said her mother.
“You don’t understand,” said Gaelle.
“You’re just disappointed,” said her mother.
“Disappointed,” said Gaelle. “Disappointed?”
She trembled against her mother.
“Yes,” said her mother. “That’s all.”
Gaelle sat up and turned her scar toward her mother. Then she slapped it once, and then again, much harder. It sounded like someone dropping a steak on a butcher’s block.
“No,” said her mother. “Don’t do that. What are you doing?”
Gaelle said, “You don’t understand.”
Her mother kissed the cool and smooth scar and the red skin around it, whispered that it would be all right.
“You see what I mean?” said Gaelle.
“Put your head down,” said her mother. “There. There.”
Gaelle pressed against the thighs again, the slick material of the house-dress giving under her face as she shook her head from side to side.
“I don’t want to be seen,” she said. “But if I have to be, I want to be in charge. That’s how I can get some help. Bitch somebody up. Give them what they want.”
“There. There,” said her mother.
They listened to the clock for a while, the creaking of the apartment building, the sound of their breathing.
“I’m not going to cry,” said Gaelle.
“Me neither,” said her mother.
“I wish I could go back,” said Gaelle. “To when I had a cold and you brought me a surprise, a snack.”
“Me, too,” said her mother. “You could think about it. You could try to come home.”
“Sure,” said Gaelle. “I’ll think it over.”
Gaelle sat up, thanked her mother for the tea, powdered her face with the compact, kissed her mother on the cheek, and went to the door. She thought she could hear the echo from the times when she had been ten and eleven and had run through the apartment when her father had come home and had called out for her to come along with him to get an ice cream. Then she was aware of the present quietness, as though the silence were a variety of scar.
“Don’t worry,” said her mother. “It’ll be all right. Whatever it is.”
“I’ll find a way,” said Gaelle.
Her mother reached into the pocket of her dress and took out some bills, the money that was supposed to go for the housekeeping. She held out the bills and said, “Here. This will help. Go on.”
“No,” said Gaelle. “It’s not money.”
“Please,” said her mother. “Please take something from me.”
She held it out. Gaelle took it.
“Thanks,” said her mother.
Gaelle went into the hall and thought how she used to run down the stairs, but now she pushed the ivory button for the elevator and waited for the creak of the rising cage, and when it stopped, she opened the door with its series of elongated Xs and got in. She pulled it shut and stood behind the bars as the cage made a slow descent.
The darkness below the cage seemed like that appalling oblivion, that darkness before and after life, and as the elevator trembled in its descent, Gaelle had the fleeting vision, almost a hope, of someone who cared about her, who loved her enough to save her from that realm, that universe without stars, at once infinite and without light. She put out her hand, as though reaching for whoever this might be, this man she could trust. Then she dismissed this as another notion that from time to time she had, as cloying as cheap perfume. And yet, as she dismissed it and pushed it into the deepest recesses, she felt it growing, getting larger, even feeding on her desire not to have such ideas.
Mani Carlson, director of the Red Front Fighters in Berlin, had not kept a careful accounting of the money from Moscow. It had been brought by courier, delivered in a black gladstone bag, the bills new and bound in neat piles by strips of paper that were pasted together. The bag seemed essentially English, bloated like a man with too much money, and yet Mani ran his fingers over the good leather, the brass clasps, and felt the solid heft of the bag. Then he dismissed this as a lingering infatuation with luxury and comfort. He knew he shouldn’t care about such things, and yet when he was in a pharmacy he picked up a badger shaving brush, the porcelain base of it as big around as a water glass. The idea of the thick, scented lather on his face left him calm, even hopeful. The real problem, he knew, was his sloppy accounting.
The bills in the bag had been counterfeit, but the work done in Moscow along these lines (passports, identity papers, currency) was so good that it would be impossible to distinguish it from the real thing. Mani wondered why it was that Moscow could produce such beautiful forgeries but yet couldn’t make a good leather bag. That would come later, he guessed. He knew that it wouldn’t be long before he was asked to show his ledgers, his receipts, the long, careful rows of figures, the black line at the bottom where the sums should balance: so much received, so much spent, so much remaining. Friends of his had been invited to Moscow, and many of them had never come back to Berlin, and, of course, accounting was one of the subjects that Moscow was most concerned about. He was a little seasick as he thought about the time when he would be asked for his accounting by the men from Moscow who were at once exhausted and jumpy, and who had dandruff and bad breath.
Mani was thirty-four years old, a man of medium height with tin colored hair, eyes a pale green like the tint of formaldehyde in a specimen bottle. A new scar ran along the side of his face from his hair to his jaw and disappeared into the top of his shirt. Members of the Reichsbanner, a group of Social
ists who supported the Weimar government, had slashed him in a street fight. The men in Moscow hated the Socialists even more than they hated the Brownshirts.
Mani told himself that part of the reason he hadn’t kept an accounting was that the money wasn’t real, just counterfeit, and yet he knew this was no excuse. When they came for him, they wouldn’t care about that. They wanted discipline, and if he didn’t have it, they would get someone who did. So how would Mani cover up the money he had spent on French brandy and nights on the town?
Mani went to one of the print shops he used, a small place that smelled of solvent and the fishy stink of ink. The printer, who drank a beer while the press ran, looked up and saluted Mani with the glass.
“What can I do for you?” said the printer. “Have you got a rush job? Some posters? How long do you give the current government? Weeks? Months?”
Mani shrugged.
“It won’t be long,” he said. “Look. I need some blank receipts. I lost the ones you gave me.”
The printer made an adjustment on the press, which made a steady ker-chunk, ker-chunk.
“Well, you’ve been a good customer,” he said. He put down the beer and went to the drawer behind the counter and took out some receipts.
“I need more than that,” said Mani. “A lot more.”
“No kidding?” said the printer. “What have you been doing with the money?”
“What’s it to you?” said Mani.
“Nothing,” said the printer. “But what am I supposed to do if anyone comes around and asks for my copies of the receipts you make up?”
“Lie,” said Mani.
The printer adjusted the press. The roller swept up the plate and left the ink there like the squirt of an octopus. The press made that constant ker-chunk, ker-chunk.
“And you’ll bring me more business?” said the printer.
“Sure,” said Mani.
The printer shrugged and pushed the blank receipts over.
“Careful,” he said. “You’ve got to be careful with those men from Moscow.”
“You can always say your records were stolen,” said Mani.
“Let’s hope I don’t have to say anything,” said the printer.
Mani went to the lumberyard where he had gotten materials for the street-theater stage and asked for receipts there, too. He got them from the grocers, used-clothes dealers, hardware stores where he had bought ball bearings to throw at his opponents in a street fight. Then he sat down and filled out the blank forms, careful to smudge the ink and to use different colors, too. He included amounts in his ledger that made it look as though he had gone hungry to pay the printers, the lumberyard, etc. The receipts, however, looked too new, and so he caught some cockroaches and put them in a box with the documents and left them there for a couple of weeks. After that the paper was spotted and looked older, but would they fool anyone from Moscow? After all, in Moscow they made the best documents in the world, and did that mean they were the best at spotting a phony? Mani didn’t know. Soon, though, he would find out.
He had been in tight places before, and he told himself that he just had to sit tight, not to panic, to wear a dog face and to plead ignorance when he had to, although looking them in the eye in circumstances like this took energy, and he was getting tired. He wanted to sleep late and took comfort in the toasty warmth of his bed. He smoked more cigarettes and had trouble shaving every day. In his room, hidden under his bed, he had a collection of pirate stories, which he read when he couldn’t sleep.
Now, at the street theater, he stood at the side of the stage. It wasn’t the best crowd, but it wasn’t too bad, although he wouldn’t want to have these numbers if he was being observed by the men from Moscow. More and more he looked at his life through this lens, and when he did, he had trouble sitting still, in being confident, in trying to be optimistic. Maybe he would buy some cocaine to lift his mood, and if it worked even for a few hours, it would be worth it. Onstage a man in stripped trousers and a top hat was loading up a big bag with piles of stage money. The crowd booed. Mani thought about the accounting.
The young woman stood at the rear of the crowd. Early twenties, blond hair, smooth skin, a sort of sultry impatience. She wore a new gray skirt, good shoes, a blouse, and a fashionable coat. Mani guessed she was the daughter of someone who worked in an insurance office, something like that. Usually they were the easy ones: he’d charm them and get them to work for a while, sewing for the theater, working in the café, passing out leaflets, running errands. In a couple of months they’d go on to the next new thing, vegetarian cults, astrology, channeling the dead, drugs, dance crazes, new hairstyles. Then she turned and exposed her face, the mask, or half mask like one out of a Greek play.
The other members of the sparse crowd were a mixture of students with their satchels, workingmen in their blue pants and leather aprons, women who had stopped as a matter of curiosity. The usual collection. He thought that if he could just avoid looking at the girl with the scar, he could forget the shock of recognition: her presence here, the strength it took just to stand there, the odd attractiveness so bound up with what had obviously happened to her made for a charge, a kind of valence of possibility. He thought that she could understand everything.
He walked over to her. She wore a light scent, or maybe it was just the soap she used combined with her skin. Just standing next to her made him feel better, and the scar was soothing, if only because it made him feel momentarily superior. And then anything was better than his worries about the accounts, his room with the pirate books under the bed, the waiting for the knock on the door, the visit that was coming, the men from Moscow with the bad breath and black teeth.
“Hi,” he said. “I haven’t seen you around before.”
“It’s my first time here,” she said.
She turned to face him, her expression one of a frank challenge. Go on, she said. Look. Do you dare?
He turned away, but he felt her presence and that challenge, and then he screwed up his courage and faced her. It was like lifting a weight. She smiled. So, he thought, she understands even this first moment.
“What do you think of the theater?” he said.
“It could be funnier,” she said. “It’s pretty dull.”
Mani knew this was an understatement. The actors were going through the motions. The songs were sung off-key. The jokes were stale.
“Maybe it will get better,” said Mani. “Come back next week. This is just a run-through, a tryout. I’m thinking of making changes.”
The crowd applauded in a perfunctory way, and soon people began to wander off. At the rear of the stage, a man took off a wig, and his makeup made him look like a man who had just come up from a coal mine. Clean under his hat but dirty on his face.
“Sure,” said the girl. “I thought I’d see what you are up to, you know. Look around.”
“It’s not only this,” said Mani.
“Oh?” she said. She shifted her weight and seemed to move a little closer. “Like what? Fighting in the streets?”
“Yes,” said Mani. “We fight the thugs. The Brownshirts.”
“And do you stick up for your friends?” she said. “If one of your friends was having trouble with them, would you help out?”
“Of course,” said Mani. “Of course.”
“Hmpf,” said Gaelle. “Imagine that.”
“You don’t sound convinced,” said Mani.
“Oh,” she said with a smile. “I believe you.”
“Come on,” said Mani. “Let’s go have a sweet. We can talk things over.”
“Like what?” she said.
“Maybe you can help out,” he said. “We need some help.”
“Really,” she said. “And what’s in it for me?”
“You can join us,” said Mani. “Be part of something.”
He noticed that something seemed to be trying to get out of the scar, and he felt this as a squirm that ran straight through him, that left him with a sudden sense
of stiffening. Maybe it is just being afraid, he thought, maybe I am just desperate for a little distraction.
“My name is Gaelle,” she said.
“I’m Mani,” he said. “Let’s have a sweet.”
He thought of sitting with her while she licked chocolate off a spoon, her face so troubling, her presence having that odd gravity. For an instant, Mani had the wild desire to let himself go, to allow himself to think that her vitality, her shocking attractiveness, could save him. Then he thought, from what? From the accounting.
So, the contest began, with Mani on one side and Gaelle on the other: he wanted a demonstration of dedication, and Gaelle was willing to endure almost anything to obtain protection, to have someone to turn to when she needed help with Hauptmann. She looked at Mani with the smile of a long-distance runner who sees an amateur trying to get through a difficult course for the first time. After all, she had her experience from the park and the things she had done there. What could he do to her that she hadn’t already endured?
She resisted the notion that something else was going on here, and while she made a face when she considered it, and while she pushed it further away from her usual thinking, she found that she was still interested in that hope, that cheap perfume, as she called it, that someone might care about her. It was ridiculous on the face of it, on any evidence she could find, and yet it persisted for all the arguments against it. What could love do about the fact that she had become a spy and not even a good one? That is, if you thought a good spy was one who wasn’t going to end up in the river.
They began with the street theater. The stage for it was made in sections that were bolted together by members of the Red Front. Karl did most of the heavy lifting. He was six feet four inches tall and his hands were the size of baseball gloves and his face looked like a leather suitcase that had been dragged halfway around the world. His hair was thick, clipped short like a brush. His dark eyes had an expression of what seemed to be indifference but that Gaelle knew was the result of an interior life, one of hopes and desires that were fiercely denied. If a woman looked at him, he dropped his eyes, as though ashamed of his size, his hands, his roughness. He said that he didn’t mind being alone, since it was like a raincoat, a way of keeping things from touching him. He said that he had gotten used to it, and once you are used to something, it doesn’t matter anymore. You even grow to like it. You can make something that hurts into a kind of honor.
