It is only after a rather long while that he comes back out and hands his Reisepass to the anxious traveler, whom he gratifies with a vaguely socialist but more likely a somewhat national salute, while explaining: “Alies in Ordnung.” Wallon glances at the offending page of the visa and observes that it now includes an entry stamp and an exit one as well, dated the same day and the same hour, two minutes apart, and at the same checkpoint. He salutes in his turn with a half-extended hand and an emphatic “Danke!” careful to preserve his serious expression.
On the other side of the border there is no problem. The soldier is a young and jovial G.I. with a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses, who speaks French with almost no accent. After a quick glance at the passport, he merely asks the traveler if he is a relative of Henri Wallon the historian, the Father of the Constitution. “He was my grandfather,” Ascher answers calmly, with a perceptible tremor of emotion in his voice. So now he is in the American zone, contrary to what he had imagined, having doubtless confused the city’s two airports, Tegel and Tempelhof. As a matter of fact, the French zone of occupation must be located much farther north.
The Friedrichstrasse then continues straight ahead in the same direction, as far as the Mehringplatz and the Landwehrkanal, but here everything seems to belong to another world. Of course, there are still ruins, almost everywhere, but their density is less overwhelming. This sector must have been less systematically bombed than the center of town, as well as less ardently defended, stone by stone, than the iconic buildings of the regime. Moreover, the cleanup of the remains of the cataclysm is virtually complete here. Many repairs have been carried to their conclusion, and reconstruction of the razed apartment blocks seems well on its way. The pseudo-Wallon, too, feels suddenly different: lighthearted, idle, as though on vacation. Around him, on the recently washed sidewalks, are people going about their ordinary tasks or else hurrying toward specific goals, reasonable and everyday concerns. A few automobiles roll calmly by, keeping to the right on the highway now cleared of all debris, generally the wrecks of military vehicles.
Making his way into the huge square which bears the name, so unexpected in this sector, of Franz Mehring, founder with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist movement, Boris Wallon immediately notices a sort of large popular brasserie where he can finally drink a cup of coffee, excessively diluted in the American style, and ask directions. The address he is looking for offers no difficulties: he must follow the Landwehrkanal to the left toward Kreuzberg, which the navigable canal crosses at several points. Feldmesserstrasse, which runs perpendicular to it, again on the left, corresponds to a dead-end branch of this same canal, known as the Defense, from which it is separated by a short iron bridge that used to be a drawbridge but has long been out of commission. The street actually consists of the two rather narrow quays, accessible to automobile traffic nonetheless, which line each side of the long-stagnant pool to which the abandoned hulls of old wooden barges add a melancholy, nostalgic charm. The rough paving of the quays, without sidewalks, emphasize this atmosphere of a vanished world.
The houses lining each side are low and vaguely countrified, most with only one story. They appear to date from the end of the last century or the beginning of this one and have been almost completely spared by the war. Just at the corner of the Defense Canal and its unnavigable arm stands a sort of villa of no particular style but which nonetheless suggests comfort and even a certain old-fashioned luxury. A solid iron fence lined on the inside by a thick privet hedge trimmed to a man’s height makes it impossible to get a view of the ground floor and the narrow strip of garden surrounding the entire structure. All that can be seen is the second floor and the stucco ornaments around its windows; the cornice, with Corinthian decorations embellishing the façade; and the four-sided slate roof, its upper ridge lined by a perforated zinc strip of scrollwork representing sheaves of grain.
Contrary to what might be expected, the fence has no gate to the Landwehrkanal, but only to the quiet Feldmesser-strasse, on which this agreeable little mansion occupies the number 2 site, clearly visible on a blue enamel plaque slightly chipped at one corner, above a rather pompous doorway opposite the gate. A varnished wooden panel of recent manufacture, decorated with elegant hand-painted flourishes meant to reproduce those of the 1900 ironwork, suggests that a discreet shop is now installed in this middle-class residence: Die Sirenen der Ostsee (in other words: “The Mermaids of the Baltic”) in gothic script, and underneath in much more modest roman letters: “Puppen und Gliedermädchen. Ankauf und Verkauf” (“Dolls and Mannequins Bought and Sold”). Wallon wonders what connection there can be between this enterprise, with its possibly suspicious connotations, suggested by the German word Mädchen, and the stiff Prussian officer whose official residence this is and who perhaps was murdered last night in the Soviet zone … or perhaps not.
Since the traveler feels anything but presentable after his previous day’s exertions, and comatose from lack of sleep and an overlong fast, he continues walking on the uneven paving stones, where certain larger holes between the countless humps and crannies have retained little puddles of reddish water, temporary residue of a recent rainfall dyed—it would seem—by the rust of a faded, lost, but clinging memory. Which actually reappears rather harshly a hundred yards farther on, where the branch of the canal comes to a dead end. On the opposite bank a pale sunbeam suddenly illuminates the low houses, their old-fashioned façades mirrored in the motionless green water; against the quay lies an old, capsized sailboat whose rotting hull reveals at several points its skeleton of ribs, floorboards, and beams. The luminous evidence of this déjà vu persists for a while, though the murky winter light soon resumes its gray tonalities.
Unlike certain low barges which could, before they were wrecked, have passed under the iron bridge without the necessity of raising the roadway, this one stray fishing boat, with its tall mast still erect (though slanting today at an angle of about forty-five degrees), could only have come to its mooring here at the period when the drawbridge was still working, at the entrance to the adjacent canal. Wallon thinks he remembers that the wrecked boat, having unexpectedly risen out of the depths of his memory, was already in that picturesque derelict condition when he first saw it, precisely in the same place at the very heart of the same ghostly setting; which of course seems strange if this is a childhood memory, as he now has the intense conviction that it is: little Henri, as he was called then, in homage to his illustrious godfather, might have been five or six, and holding his mother’s hand while she was looking for some relative, close no doubt but lost to sight following a family quarrel. So would nothing have changed in forty years? Possibly, as far as the uneven pavement, the blue-green water, and the stucco houses are concerned, but as for the rotten wood of a fishing boat, such a thing was inconceivable. As if time and weather had performed their corrosive actions once and for all, and had subsequently ceased functioning by some miracle or other.
The branch of the quay perpendicular to the axis of the canal, which permits cars and pedestrians to cross from one side to the other, follows an iron fence in very poor condition behind which can be seen nothing but trees, tall lindens which, like the neighboring buildings, have survived the bombings without mutilation or visible damage, they too just the same—the traveler supposes—as they were so long ago. The Feldmesserstrasse comes to a dead end here. This detail had moreover been pointed out by the kindly waitress in the brasserie Spartacus (the glorious Thracian rebellion having today bequeathed its name to a brand of Berlin beer). Beyond those old trees—she had indicated—in the shade of which grow a mass of weeds and brambles, begins the Russian sector, marking the northern limit of Kreuzberg.
However, the traveler is distracted from his recurrent visions of a buried past, resurfacing in bits and pieces, by a series of sounds which are anything but characteristically urban: a cock-crow which recurs three times, clear and melodious despite its remoteness, no longer in time but now in space. The a
coustic quality of the crowing, undisturbed by any parasitical noise, permits measuring this unusual silence amid which it rings out, echoing far and wide. Wallon now realizes: since he has turned down this unfrequented country lane, he has not encountered a living soul nor heard anything at all except his own shoe occasionally brushing against an anfractuosity of the pavement. The place would be ideal for the rest he so badly needs. Turning around, he discovers almost without surprise that a hotel marked with the symbol of an acceptable category, which he had completely ignored when he arrived, constitutes the last building on the even-numbered side—the hotel is number 10 and probably dates from the same period as the rest of the street. But a broad rectangular signboard of lacquered tin, new and shiny, with old-gold letters on a reddish ochre ground and obviously painted quite recently, proclaims: “Die Verbündeten” (“The Allies”). The front room of the ground floor has even been turned into a sort of bistro, its French name, Café des Alliés, encouraging Wallon to push open the door of this providential haven.
The interior is very dark, and even more silent, if such a thing is possible, than the deserted quay he has just left behind. The traveler takes a while to identify, in the depths of the room, an apparently living person: a huge, fat man with a repellent countenance who seems to be waiting, motionless as a spider in the center of its web, standing behind an old-fashioned carved wooden counter on which he rests both hands and leans slightly forward. This factotum, who must double as bartender and receptionist, does not utter a single word of welcome; but a sign, set quite prominently in front of him, specifies: “On parle français.” Making what seems a tremendous effort, the traveler begins in a shaky voice: “Bonjour, Monsieur, do you have any rooms?”
The man contemplates the intruder without stirring for a long while before answering in French, but with a strong Bavarian accent and in an almost threatening tone of voice: “Combien?”
“Do you mean how much money?”
“No, how many rooms!”
“Just one, obviously.”
“Not obvious at all: you asked for rooms.”
Perhaps because of the total exhaustion that has overcome him, the traveler has the strange sense of repeating a dialogue written out ahead of time and already uttered sometime previously (but where? and when? and by whom?), as if he were onstage, acting in a play written by someone else. Auguring badly, moreover, for the consequences of a negotiation entered into with such hostility, he is already prepared to beat a retreat when a second man, as corpulent as the first, appears out of the still-deeper shadows of an adjacent office. As he approaches his colleague, his similarly round and glabrous countenance becomes gradually wreathed in a jovial smile apparently caused by perceiving this potential client in difficulty. And he exclaims, in a much less heavily accented French: “Bonjour, Monsieur Wall! You’re back with us?”
Looming now beside one another behind the counter, towering over the increasingly abashed Wallon (probably on a step above him), they look like twins, so identical are their faces, despite their different expressions. As troubled by this doubling of the receptionist as by the inexplicable knowledge of his own person indicated by the words of the more prepossessing half of his interlocutor, the traveler at first supposes, in an entirely absurd reflex, that he must have come here at some earlier time with his mother and that the man remembers.… He stammers an incomprehensible phrase. But his cordial host immediately resumes: “Forgive my brother, Monsieur Wall. Franz was away earlier in the week, and you were here for such a short visit. But the room and bath is still available.… You don’t need to fill out a new slip, since there’s really not been any interruption.”
As the traveler remains silent, overwhelmed, without its even occurring to him to take the key being offered, the innkeeper, no longer smiling, is surprised to see him in this condition; in the reproachful tone of a family doctor, he says: “You seem all in, poor Monsieur Wall: here too late last night and gone too soon this morning, without even taking breakfast. But we’ll take care of that: dinner is ready. Franz will take up your luggage. And Maria will serve you right away.”
Boris Wallon, known as Wall, has let everything be done for him without a thought passing through his head.4
Luckily Maria neither spoke nor understood French. And he himself, already somewhat confused in his native language, had now ceased to understand German. The girl having asked a question concerning the menu which required an answer, it was necessary to call “Herr Josef” to the rescue. The latter, ever abounding in consideration, settled the problem immediately, without Wallon’s understanding what its bearing really was. He did not even know, while he was eating with a somnambulistic indifference, what was on the plate in front of him. The innkeeper, whose friendliness was turning to a sort of police vigilance,5 remained standing for a moment beside his sole customer’s table, bathing him in the warmth of his protective and indiscreet gaze. Before leaving, he murmured to him, as if in confidence, with a grin of friendly complicity, quite excessive and utterly artificial: “You were quite right, Monsieur Wall, to get rid of your mustache. It didn’t become you.… Besides, it was too obviously artificial.” The traveler made no reply.
* * *
Note 4 – No more than the transition from first to third person upon Ascher’s waking in the booby-trapped J.K. apartment, this impromptu switch from present indicative to perfect tense—quite temporary, moreover—does not alter, in our opinion, either the narrator’s identity or the period of the narration. Whatever distance the narrating voice seems to take in relation to the character, the content of the utterances never ceases to reproduce an internal knowledge of himself, autoperceptive and instantaneous, even if it is occasionally disingenuous; the point of view remains that of our multinominal and deliberately pseudonymous subject. A more problematic question, it seems to us, concerns the intended recipient of these narratives. A so-called report addressed to Pierre Garin can hardly be convincing: the crude falsifications of actions and objects, on several main points, could in no case deceive a technician of this caliber, especially when he himself has set the traps, as Ascher must certainly suspect. From another point of view, if Ascher were operating unbeknownst to us for another organization, even for another of the belligerents now in Berlin, he would have no interest in passing for a fool. Unless a whole new dimension of his possible betrayal escapes us.
Note 5 – Franz and Josef Mahler, actually twins, are indeed known to be informers. They do not work for us, but for the American Secret Service, and perhaps for the Soviet police as well. It is difficult to tell them apart, except by their accent when they speak French, although Bavarian accents as exaggerated as theirs are easy for either one of the pair to reproduce. As for Josef’s agreeable smile as opposed to Franz’s surliness, we have had numerous occasions to note that they exchange these characteristics with the greatest ease and perfect synchronicity. Fortunately they are almost always seen together (as Zwinge frequently observes, delighting as he does in riddles and puns of all sorts: un Mahler n’arrive jamais seul), which frees us from asking too many questions. Pretty Maria, on the other hand, is one of our most reliable correspondents. She knows French perfectly, but carefully conceals the fact for reasons of efficiency. The Mahler brothers, who ultimately discovered the truth of the situation, accept playing the game without a word to anyone, hoping to obtain some advantage for themselves one day or another.
* * *
Once his meal was over, the traveler went upstairs to room number 3 and took a quick bath, after removing from his heavy dispatch case what he needed for the night. But in his haste, he removed at the same time a small object wrapped in flesh-colored paper, which was perhaps not in its usual place and which fell on the floor, producing a loud, sharp sound, indicative of considerable weight. Wall picked it up, wondering what the thing might be, and unwrapped the package in order to identify its contents: it was a small, jointed, porcelain figure of a naked girl, about ten centimeters long, in every respect identical to
those he had played with as a child. Of course, he carried nothing of the kind with him these days on his journeys. Yet this evening nothing could surprise him. On the inner, white surface of the wrapping paper was printed the name and address of a nearby doll shop: “Die Sirenen der Ostsee, Feldmesserstrasse 2, Berlin-Kreuzberg.”
Having emerged from his beneficial ablutions, the traveler sat down in his pajamas on the edge of the bed. His body was somewhat relaxed, but his mind was absolutely blank. At this point he scarcely knew where he was. In the night table drawer there was, in addition to the traditional Bible, a large, worn map of Berlin, carefully creased along its original folds. Wall then recalled having vainly looked for his own map when he had tried, before leaving the ruined house on Gendarmenplatz, to check, piece by piece, the proper order of the items in his dispatch case. Without dwelling on the happy coincidence which his latest find represented, he slid under the feather bed wrapped in its linen shroud and instantly fell asleep.
While he slept (and therefore in an altogether different temporal existence), he experienced once again one of his most frequent nightmares, which proceeded to its conclusion without awakening him. Little Henri must have been at most ten years old. He had had to ask the study hall teacher for permission to leave the room for the satisfaction of an urgent need. He is wandering now through the deserted recreation courtyards, passing through the arcaded playgrounds and interminable empty corridors, opening any number of doors, to no purpose. No one is there to tell him where to go, and he recognizes none of the appropriate places disseminated throughout the huge school building (is this the Lycée Buffon?). Finally he happens to find him self in his own classroom and immediately sees that his usual assigned seat, which he had left just a few moments earlier (very long moments?), is now occupied by another boy of the same age—a new student, probably, for he fails to recognize him. But observing him more closely, young Henri realizes, without being particularly surprised by the fact, that the other boy looks very much like himself. The faces of his schoolfellows turn one by one toward the door in order to consider with obvious disapproval the intruder who has remained on the threshold, no longer knowing where to go: there is no empty seat in the whole study hall.… Only the usurper remains bent over his desk, diligently committed to composing his French theme in his very tiny script, fine and regular and without a single erasure.6
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