Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  Germans were supposed to shout, hoarsely. The blond did, but only him. They were supposed to stomp around. These did not. Germans were supposed to be arrogant and haughty. These were friendly although, thankfully, not too friendly and one or two were downright gentle. You were supposed to be able to see the evil they had done in the expression on their faces. Joe saw none of this. They were orderly but quiet about it and he liked that. They asked what he had done on his trips into Paris and when he told them they were interested. At least two of them, Joe thought, were exceptionally nice. One, Hans, a slim, slight, dark-eyed, long-haired physicist was keen on ancient civilisations, especially the Assyrian and the Egyptian, and explained to Joe where the best exhibitions could be found. The other, Manfred, was shy and, unusually, rather lazy, languorous even, much enamoured of lying on his bed reading poetry. ‘Hesse,’ he confessed when Joe asked him, ‘Very predictable. What you read is much more exciting.’

  So where were the Germans his third and index fingers had shot down in their scores when he was a boy? Only the Japanese were greater enemies. And where were the Germans who had bombed London, blitzkrieged Belgium, stormed through Poland, and exterminated the Jews? Where were those Germans?

  It was wrong, he thought, to look for those Germans in these boys. They would have been children when the war ended. Believing himself to be an original, a pathfinder in the perception of this matter, Joe concluded that the war, thanks mainly to the British, had ‘cured the poisoned wound of Germany’ as he wrote to Mr. Braddock, and victory had ‘cauterised’ it. These were new people and could not be judged as if they were their fathers. Joe worked that through carefully over the four weeks he was there. They had to be given a clean slate, a new start.

  It was not always simple. One of the boys talked about his father’s heroics as a U-Boat Commander and Joe’s fascination was increasingly eaten away by the pressing realisation that it was British sailors who had been killed and he left the circle to go outside. Reiner came to join him and said nothing as Joe gazed rather bemusedly out of the window.

  And one evening out of nowhere Friedrich, the very blond one, took exception to what Joe was saying about different armies. It began with a polite enquiry into Joe’s father’s part in the war and turned into a vigorous discussion of the Burma Campaign about which Friedrich was clearly and insistently more knowledgeable than Joe. Joe was irritated by this and claimed knowledge he did not have, only to be remorselessly unmasked. They turned to the strength and skill of the armies of different nations in the war. The Americans, Friedrich declared, were the worst next to the Italians. The Russians, he said, were the bravest, the French the weakest, the Australian Army was excellent and so were the New Zealanders and the Canadians. The British were gallant but poorly led. They were third. The Japanese were the cruellest but also the second best. The Germans were the best army. They nearly beat the rest of the world put together.

  Joe disagreed. At first, as he thought, reasonably. Friedrich’s dismissive smile became increasingly annoying. Joe had a problem with facts. Friedrich’s came out of an incontestable certainty of superior study. Joe just knew, just absolutely knew that the British were best because in the end they always had been, look at Agincourt, look at the Spanish Armada, always outnumbered, but in the end … look at the Battle of Britain, outnumbered again, and at Kohima - they won when it mattered. Winning was only important when it mattered. It may have been Joe’s vehemence. It may have been an unfortunate reference to Germany’s fascination with Hitler, but fists were raised and then the two of them were leathering each other with interest.

  It was Hans who led the raid to pull them apart. It was Hans who designated Reiner to stay with Joe and help bathe his lip while with the others he marched Friedrich to the far end of the room. All Joe heard was an intense growl of anger, one or two interruptions from Friedrich, even more intense anger.

  They returned as a corps, Hans and Friedrich in the lead. Friedrich stuck out his hand.

  ‘I apologise, Joseph. Please accept like an English gentleman.’ He bowed.

  Joe’s anger melted away instantly.

  ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’ he said and took the offered hand. ‘Thanks.’

  Occasionally he went into Paris with Hans or Reiner but he preferred to go alone. He did not want to share what was happening to him. He did not want it explained to him, however skilfully by Hans, however sympathetically by Reiner. At times he did not want it explained at all. Just to look, and by looking try to draw out the meaning, by gazing at these paintings, these sculptures, these monuments, this stained glass, that statue, just by gazing and being there, he thought, he would understand. Like one impulse from a vernal wood. Like that.

  At first there was so much that he did not know where to begin, nervous that there was little time and he knew so little he could be making wrong choices. The Louvre was always safe and he would walk around in a daze of masterpieces, gallery after gallery, fighting against museum fatigue, gorging beyond saturation, emerging stupefied. Notre Dame too never let you down. He could lose himself looking at those mighty doors, walking round the outside of the building to see the flying buttresses like the exposed roots of a vast mythical tree, sitting across from the Cathedral with a cognac, a glass of water, a coffee and a packet of Disque Bleu, drifting into that deeply coloured candle-lit Catholic bustle of suppurating whispers, gazing up at the rose windows, hopelessly trying to absorb it all, drugged by it.

  In Notre Dame he almost wished he were a Roman Catholic. He observed people going into the confessional and wished he could have done the same. It was all very well talking to God in a group at St. Mary’s, but admitting your sins to one person alone in Notre Dame seemed more likely to succeed. Maybe in one of those boxes someone could help him about the sin of sex with Rachel, especially as he had no intention of giving it up.

  That was one of the factors gradually driving him away from St. Mary’s because there was no answer there except to give it up. Why was it a sin in the first place? If she got pregnant he would marry her. At some level in his mind this was a preferred option: for by marrying he would keep her and be with her always and if he considered his life truthfully, as he did when he felt particularly blue, that was what he wanted more than anything else. He would even trade in days in Notre Dame and the Louvre for a single afternoon on the Moss with Rachel, although his more pious strain might attempt to deny that. The longing for her was never far away and imagining her daily routine was not only a comfort but a pleasure to be saved up, to be savoured.

  So pregnancy was not a problem. Surely sex could not be objected to because it was so good? That just left sin: the edict that it was wrong because it was wrong, but the Ten Commandments talked about what not to do after marriage, not before. Yet it was a sin. Everybody knew that. Even people in Wigton who never went to church at all. If you did it before you were married you were dirty and asking for it and there would be a terrible come-uppance. And if you went to church it weighed on you, as it did on Joe. It was something he had to bear, shrug and wrestle with alone as best he could. But here, in Notre Dame, people queued up and talked through the grille (he had glanced in an empty box) and came away forgiven, absolved, free, after a few prayers, a candle perhaps, and a promise to sin no more; but they could because they could come back to the same box again next week.

  Feeling that the eyes of all in Notre Dame were on him, Joe lit a candle, pressed it on a spike, knelt and prayed that Rachel and he would be O.K. together, and paid his franc faithfully. Surely non-Catholics were allowed.

  Would he dare to go into a confessional box?

  Rachel came out into hard sunlight and tilted her head down until her eyes adjusted after the twilight of the bank. She had imagined that the branch in Carlisle, where she had just been interviewed for a six-week attachment, would be full of light as it was so grand, but there was the same gloom as Wigton; banks were a bit like those village churches Joe had occasionally tempted her to visit, she thought, places
built to deny the sun.

  They had given her the Saturday morning working time off for the interview, which had been scheduled at the end of business. She had been nervous but the anxiety had evaporated as soon as she saw the man; it was clear that all he wanted to do was to get it over with as soon as possible and go home. He ran out of steam after three questions, spent some time sifting through the paper mound on his desk to find her C.V., gave up, asked if there were any questions from her, was openly relieved when she said no and, with the only flourish of the encounter, told her that she would be ‘informed in due course’. And she had dressed up for that!

  Linda was coming to join her for an afternoon’s potter around the shops, but her bus would not arrive for almost an hour. Rachel stood on the hot pavement uncertainly. She did not want to spoil their afternoon by looking around the shops on her own; all she knew of Carlisle was the County Ballroom and the railway station, both at night; Joe, she smiled to herself, would have gone to the Cathedral or something - more gloom.

  ‘You look lost.’

  He sprawled at the wheel of the small red open-topped M.G. two-seater sports car, imitating someone in a film, she thought, and she laughed at the obviousness of his pose, the show-off little car whose like she had never seen before, the transparent way in which he fancied his chances. He was very good looking, she thought, in a film star way, and he knew it.

  ‘Garry Powell,’ he said, ‘I kept looking at you while you were waiting to meet the boss.’ Rachel nodded. ‘You blushed,’ he said, ‘but you didn’t look back.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’

  ‘I’m waiting for a girl friend.’ Why had she said ‘girl’?

  It was an exciting car, she thought; she had never before considered a car to be exciting but she looked down on this red projectile in open admiration.

  ‘Fancy a spin?’

  She did. But what would that say about her? ‘How long have you got?’

  ‘About an hour.’ Rachel looked at her watch. ‘Fifty minutes.’ No one in Carlisle knew her. ‘You can do a lot in fifty minutes.’

  He offered up a smile which Rachel thought was both charming and fake, but again it made her want to laugh. It was entirely new for her, this encounter; there was something easy, fleeting, unencumbered about it: and a faint thrill of risk. ‘How fast can it go?’

  ‘Not much more than ninety on these roads.’

  ‘Show off!’

  He smiled as if delighted to be awarded an insult from such an attractive young woman.

  ‘Yes or no?’ He leaned across and pushed open the door.

  Rachel looked around. What could possibly be the harm in it? Joe was in another country gobbling up art galleries. It was the middle of the day. Garry worked in the bank. People were allowed to be friendly. She had a right to some sort of life of her own. What was Joe up to?

  So near the ground, the hot wind in her face, streaming back her hair, the heart-soaring sense of speed, of being free, twisting dangerously through the rich, docile pasturelands of the Eden valley, new country to Rachel, as new and as glamorous as the car; the man, the speed.

  He snapped to a stop in front of what to Rachel seemed a very grand house, free-standing, one of several around a postcard village green, a pond with ducks, a church Joe would have hauled her into, a lane right next to the house leading, she could see, to a broad stretch of the River Eden, a sandstone cliff face on the further bank, an immense house placed on the top and very edge of it. Everything so unlike the working plainness of her own village; it could have been another country. And what was not on view was just as striking, Rachel thought later: a confident and entrenched feeling of assured wealth.

  ‘I’ll just take a minute to change into my tennis things.’ He hesitated and then, in what he hoped was just the right negative tone, said,

  ‘Want to come in and meet the folks?’

  ‘No fear.’

  She looked at her watch. It was so obvious that she was embarrassed for him.

  ‘Five minutes max. Scout’s Honour.’ He gave the three-fingered Boy Scouts salute and Rachel let him off.

  She felt exposed. Sat there in the flash sports car, alone and clearly waiting. The only person she saw was an elderly woman shepherding two Jack Russells down the lane. Two cars and one bicycle passed by. No one, she reasoned, was the slightest bit interested in her and yet she felt raw. As if she were seen by all to be betraying Joe. As if she had stepped unprotected into a new world it would be better for her not to know. She wanted Joe to be back; to go to the train with him in the evening; to go to the dance; to make love at Aunt Claire’s. She looked at her watch.

  ‘Did I do it?’

  Rachel was puzzled.

  ‘In five minutes? Frantic!’ He displayed himself. Dazzling, crisp white shorts. White sweater slung around his neck. White shirt. White socks and tennis shoes. Two tennis rackets.

  His enthusiasm, if even, as she suspected, it was only about himself, burst in on her fears, chased out the gloom, made her smile even at the silliness of it, his honesty, it appeared, the freshness.

  ‘Why do you want two rackets?’

  ‘It looks good,’ he said, and Rachel liked that reply.

  He felt lucky to find a table on the Boulevard St. Germain itself. The early evening, especially on a Saturday, was the most crowded time, he had noted, especially at the Deux Magots where the tables aproned onto the broad pavements in front and to the side of the famous café in which, Joe had been told, Sartre and Camus could often be spotted, sitting with a drink half the day, writing masterpieces at those heavy little tables. He never failed to hope he would encounter them even though his only visual references of the two men were indistinct photographs some years out of date. But their potential presence made the Deux Magpts even more of an event.

  He had spent the afternoon in the Latin Quarter, adrift in the web of small and narrow streets which were already his favourite area of Paris, streets that reminded him of the alleys and wriggling back lanes of Wigton. He had been walking for hours in the heat, ferreting in St. Severin, accidentally encountered, half hidden, its barnacled mass of grotesque gargoyles instantly become a new treasure, one of the many with which the city was cramming his mind. He had achieved a helpful and soothing level of exhaustion which dulled dependent longings for Rachel.

  He had endured the experience of intense solitariness before he had known Rachel, and he could reach back for it and the memory eased him into the lonely Saturday evening; lonely despite the pavement crowds who looked as if they were on a stage, Joe thought, or in a film. He too felt like an actor, but uncertain that he had found a part.

  It could be embarrassing to sit for a long time with a small order - one cognac, one coffee with accompanying glass of water, one croissant - but not if you wrote. He had seen others do it. In Paris you wrote in public and writing excused the measly order. He had bought paper and biro. ‘Dear Rachel.’

  Saturday night. It would not do to think too much about it. What would he have told her if she had been with him at the table? Say she had just joined him from one of those little hotels, one or two of which were so cheap (he had investigated for future visits with Rachel) that he could just about afford them. Maybe about the man in the shop in the rue de Seine, a shop stacked with African sculptures, figures, masks, weapons, what looked like totem poles, distorted animals. Joe had been magnetised by the display in the window and stopped in his tracks, seeing what he had never seen before, unable to begin to analyse what it was that attracted him; the owner had waved him in.

  Joe would have mocked his self-conscious French and made Rachel laugh by caricaturing the tiny, almost dwarf-sized sickly faced man whose black hair stood upright as if electrified by fright, whose hands and nose and ears and mouth were much too big for the spindly little body, who was kind to him, knew he knew nothing, tried to explain sometimes in slow French, sometimes in broken English. He would have made Rachel laugh
but been unfair, Joe knew that, he often knew that, but making Rachel laugh could be more important than being fair.

  One of the points the man had made was that modern artists stole from these African sculptors, he mentioned Modigliani most indignantly, just as they had previously stolen from Oceanic sculptors, Picasso came in for his lash here, and this theft not only dishonoured them, he said, and robbed of glory the originals, it also made for inauthentic art which was corrupt. Joe had been swept up in the argument, wholly on the owner’s side, and saw these artefacts not only as mysteriously powerful in themselves but also the plainest evidence of the poor people being exploited by the rich. Communism, the man declared, was the only solution to the problems of the world. Joe was not sure of that and said so, but did not want any further discussion: the man’s thesis had become too intimate.

  This owner would have talked on for hours, Joe would have told Rachel, in fact he asked him to come back when the shop was closed so that they could go out together for ‘un petit verre’, but Joe had fudged it, suddenly claustrophobic in the overcrowded little shop, suddenly menaced by the impenetrable statues, the over-intense man, the weight of unknown meaning, glad to be back on the pavement even in the stinging stone heat.

  After he thought it over he decided not to write to her about that.

  ‘I went to the Musée Rodin yesterday,’ he wrote and enjoyed the pose of writing, he, Joe Richardson, there, at the Deux Magots, just like Albert Camus, ‘and it was fantastic’ He did not write about the erotic sculpture, the secret parts of women lasciviously displayed by a man who clearly enjoyed making them for others to enjoy looking at their frozen eroticism which were exciting even in bronze. He had not cared to be seen standing too long in front of some of them. ‘In the garden there was this massive panel of Hell. You could see how the people were being tormented. It looked very convincing. I bet Hell’s just like that.’