Vera explained her commitment to Mansfield, which was an old crush on Miss Pink. It had led Vera to read this one writer when she never read anything else, or wanted to. Now that she was away from the Miss Pinks of this world, she read all the time.
Lottie’s transparent reflection was ivy green. “Do you think I look weak?” she asked, meaning that she wanted her health kept in mind.
Vera, who was tall, caught Lottie’s face at an angle Lottie had never seen. “Weak, in a way,” she said, “but not frail.” Lottie’s reflection went smug. Vera, squinting down and sideways, looked as if she thought weakness could not account for everything.
When they alighted at the station, Vera consulted a taxi-driver, whose head was a turtle’s between muffler and cap. Showing off in French, she seemed to think the driver would think she was French and take them to a gem of a restaurant. Lottie felt cold and proud. She would not mention her low blood pressure. Actually, she was supposed to drink tea or coffee almost the minute she wakened; her mother usually brought it to her in bed. She had never fainted, but that was not to say she never would. Their driver rushed them up a dirt road and abandoned them before a billboard upon which was painted in orange “RESTAURANT – BAR – DOLLARS ACCEPTED – PARKING.”
“We aren’t going to like it,” said Vera. “He took you for an American.” Nevertheless, she rushed Lottie onward, through a room where an American soldier slept in a leather armchair, past a bar where more soldiers sat as if Saturday drinking were a cheerless command, and into a totally empty dining room that smelled of eggs frying. Not empty: out of the dim corner where he was counting empty bottles came the proprietor of the place, unshaven, clad in an American gabardine. His thick eyelids drooped; he had already seen enough of Vera and Lottie. Vera was tossing her scarf and her cape and saying chummily, “Just an omelette, really – we aren’t at all hungry,” and then they were in a small room, and the door to the room shut behind them. Here ashes and orange peel spilled out of a cold grate. Three tables pushed against the wall were barricaded behind armchairs, an upright piano, dining chairs, and a cheval glass. The two girls pulled a table and chairs clear and sat down. Lottie had a view of a red clay tennis court strung with Christmas lights. She turned to see what Vera was staring at. Another table was taken, but the noise and confusion coming from it at first seemed part of the chaos in the room. Lottie now saw two American soldiers and two adolescent girls who might be their wives. One of the girls, the prettier of the two, cried out, “But tell me now, am I talking loud? Because I sound to myself like I am talking loud.” The laughter from the others was a kettledrum, and Lottie and Vera displayed their first pathetic complicity: “We aren’t Yanks,” said the look they exchanged.
Dissociating herself and perhaps Lottie from the noisy four, Vera gave their waitress a great smile and a skyrocket of French. “On n’a que ça, les Américains,” said the waitress, shrugging. Vera’s flashy French, her flashy good will did not endear her. Lottie watched the waitress’s face and understood: she didn’t like them, either. When Vera praised the small neat lighter she kept in her apron pocket, the waitress said, “C’est un briquet, tout simplement.” She served a tepid omelette on cold plates and disappeared into a more interesting region, whence came the sound of men’s voices. Lottie and Vera sat on, forgotten.
Vera said, “There should be a thing on the table you could hit that would go cling, cling.”
“A bell,” said Lottie, taken in. “The thing is a bell.”
“I know. I was showing you how Al talks.” Smoking, Vera told about walks in Roma and meals when she and her Polish friend from home had nothing to eat but hard-as-a-rock cheese. Once, he gave his share to a dog.
“Are you hard up for money, Vera?” Lottie did not mean by this she had any to lend.
“No, not really. But I sort of am when I’m with him. I pretend not to have any at all and live the way he does.” Vera was bored; she was always quickly bored. Blowing smoke all over Lottie, she began defending the four Americans. “You’ve never seen how abominable Canadians can be.”
Americans could be trained to set an example, Lottie insisted. They should be loved. Who was to blame if they were not?
Vera mashed her cigarette out on her plate. “D’you know how Canadian soldiers used to cut the Germans’ throats?” she said. “Al showed me. You push the helmet like this,” and she reached across quick as a snake and pressed the long helmet Lottie Benz would have been wearing had she been a soldier into the nape of her neck and drew her forefinger under Lottie’s chin.
Lottie understood that an attempt had been made against her life and that she was safe. She said, “I love my country, Vera, and even if I didn’t I wouldn’t run it down.”
“I’m not running it down. I’m telling you stories.”
The bill was nineteen hundred francs. Vera said it was grossly excessive. “They took you for an American,” she said. “It’s those damned overshoes.”
The air outside smelled of earth and eternally wet leaves, as though this place were unmindful of seasons. At the end of a walled lane the walled graveyard was a box. The sky (the sun was covered up now) was the lid. Lottie was still disturbed by Vera’s attack. She knew if you show nothing, eventually you feel nothing; presently, feeling nothing, she was just herself, a visitor here – not a guest, because she was paying her way. She walked a pace or two behind Vera, who had taken on a serious and rather reproachful air, sniffing at rusty iron crosses, shaking her head beside a fresh grave covered over with planks. At the only plot of grass in the cemetery, she stopped and announced that this was it. A brownish shrub had been clipped so that it neatly surrounded a stone bench. Someone – now, in December – had planted a border of yellow pansies. Vera, stalking dramatically in her cape, left Lottie to think her thoughts. A restless pilgrim, she slashed at weeds with her handbag and all at once called, “It’s not where you are, Lottie. It’s over here.” Lottie rose slowly from the bench, where she had not been thinking about Katherine Mansfield but simply nursing her several reasons for not feeling well. Where Vera stood, a block of polished granite weighed upon a block still larger. The base was cemented to the ground.
“ ‘Katherine Mansfield,’ ” Vera droned. “ ‘Wife of John Middleton Murry. 1888-1923. But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’ Well, I don’t know what that means. Another thing I wish you’d tell me – what is that awful china rose doing there instead of real flowers? It’s so puritan. You can’t just abandon people that way, under all that granite. It’s less than love. It’s just considering your own taste.”
“She is not abandoned, Vera; she is buried.”
The orator heard only herself. “The stone is even moss-resistant,” she said. But no, for the first wash of green crept up the granite step and touched a capital “M.”
Lottie, whose ears might have been deaf to everything but Vera until now, heard other sounds – a rooster crowing, a sudden rush of motors somewhere, a metallic clanging that certainly had to do with troops. Vera planted one foot upon the step and with more effort than seemed needed removed the rose. She tossed it aside; it landed in the tall grass of another grave. Then she picked a handful of yellow pansies and strewed them where the rose had been. Like all gestures, it seemed to Lottie suspect.
Lottie need never have seen Vera again after this. Vera departed for Rome, having first turned out her bureau drawers and left at Lottie’s hotel a number of things she did not require. Lottie still had not looked up all the people to whom she had been given introductions. She woke up early each day wondering whom she would be seeing that night. Despite Vera’s remark about overshoes, she went on wearing hers, and she wore her hats – the gardenia bandeau, the feather toque with veil, the suède beret – even though people turned and smiled and stared. Lottie told her new acquaintances that she had only just arrived and was eager to get to Strasbourg, where the university library contained everything she wanted; but she made no move
to go. One mild rainy night, like a night in April displaced, a couple she had talked to on the plane from Canada invited her to the Comédie-Caumartin to see Danièle Delorme in an Ibsen revival. The theatre reminded Lottie of Vera, although she could not think why. It was stuffy and hot, and had been redecorated, and it smelled of paint. “We may get a headache from this,” Lottie warned. The new friends, whose name was Morrow, thought she had said something remarkable about the play. The Morrows were dressed as if they had not planned to spend the evening together – he in tweeds and flannel, she in a sleeveless black dress with layers of silk fringe overlapping down the skirt. The bracelets on her arm jangled. Her hair was short (it had been long on the plane) and pushed behind the ears. They had both changed since the journey, but nothing about them seemed definite. Lottie thought they were not wearing their clothes from home but new outfits they were trying for effect.
Soon after the lights went down, a quarrel began in the audience. Groans and hisses and shouts of “Mal élevé!” covered the actors’ voices, and the curtains had to be drawn. The actors tried again, and got on safely until one of them said how hot it was, upon which the audience began to laugh, a spectator shouted “Oui, en effet!” and threats were exchanged, though no one was struck. Baited by the public, the actors seemed to Lottie too intimate, too involved. She lost the thread of the story and became self-conscious, as though she were on the stage.
Languidly, the Morrows glanced about as if they knew people, or expected to know them soon. “I can’t imagine why she revived it,” Mrs. Morrow said during the interval.
“The sets are dull,” said the husband. “The rest of the cast is weak.”
Lottie said, “We had better stuff than this in Winnipeg; we had these really good actors from England, and the audience knows how to behave.” Why should that make the Morrows so distant, all at once?
The husband was the first to unbend. Forgiving Lottie for her provincialism, he described the play he was over here to write – a murder, and several people who are really all one person. The several persons are either the victim, or the murderer, or a single witness. It was all the same thing.
“What will you be doing apart from that?” said Lottie.
“Nothing. That is what I am doing.”
There was something fishy about him. He was too old to be a student, yet clearly wasn’t working. Did he have money, or what?
“What do you think Ibsen did apart from that?” said the wife, turning her big black-rimmed eyes on Lottie. She held her elbow in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other.
“Nobody knows,” said Lottie. “Anyway, goodness, we’re none of us Ibsen.”
When Lottie called the Morrows at their hotel a day later, Mrs. Morrow said that Lottie was not to take this personally but she and her husband were working hard – she was typing for him – and her husband did not want to spend too much time with Canadians over here. Lottie was not offended. It confirmed her suspicion of fishiness. Nevertheless, she did want to be with someone familiar at Christmas, and so was not displeased when she found a telegram from Vera. The telegram said, “MEET YOU ALSACE SEE LETTER.” The letter came two days later. Pages long, it told where and how they were to meet, although not why.
II
Vera was dressed this time in a purple skirt and sweater she said had come from a five-and-ten in Rome. She stood idly, hand on one hip, in the lobby of their hotel while Lottie filled out a questionnaire for the police of Colmar. If her answers varied by so much as a spelling mistake from the answers she had given in Paris, she was sure she would be summoned for an explanation. Vera’s hair was thick and straight and blonder than it had been. “Didn’t I have a good idea about Christmas?” she said.
“It seemed like a good idea,” said Lottie, in the tone of one only prudently ready for anything.
“You couldn’t of done any work over Christmas anyway.”
“But why Colmar, Vera?”
“You’ll see enough of Strasbourg. You might as well look at something else.” Lottie let Vera link an arm through hers and guide her out of the hotel into a light-blue evening. The shape of what seemed to be a street of very old houses was outlined in colored lights. Near a church someone had propped a ladder and climbed into a spruce tree to hang tinsel balls. The spire of the church had been lighted as well, but halfheartedly, as if the electrician in charge had run out of light bulbs. Lottie thought, I have not sent Kevin a cable for Christmas.
In the restaurant Vera chose for their dinner that night, she was loud and too confident, and Lottie felt undervalued. She had submitted to a wearing journey from Paris, with a change of trains at Strasbourg. From Strasbourg to Colmar she stood, her luggage in everyone’s way, until she saw a city in a plain as flat as home, and understood this to be her destination. This much she let Vera know. What she did not say was how she had without a trace of fatigue left her luggage in the station at Strasbourg and gone out to find the cathedral. It was an important element of her thesis, for both Catholic and Protestant services were held inside; also, Dr. Keller had said something about an astronomical clock he admired. Flocks of bicycles swooped at Lottie, more unnerving than the screaming cabs of Paris. She heard German. Once, she was unable to get directions in French. When the first words of German crossed her lips, she thought they would remain, engraven, to condemn her. Speaking the secret language, she spoke in the name of unknown Grandmother Benz, whom she was said to resemble. The cathedral seemed to right itself before her – frosty, chalky, pink and trembling in the snowy air. A brown swift river divided that part of the city from the station. True Christmas was praised in shopwindows, with wine and nuts and candied peel. A gingerbread angel with painted paper face and paper wings cried of home – not of Winnipeg but of a vestigial ceremony, never mentioned as German, never confirmed as Canadian. The Paris promise of Christmas had been nonsense – all but the holly outside the hotel, and one night someone stole even that. The cold air and certain warm memories tinged her cheeks pink. She saw herself without disapproval in a glass. Sometimes strangers smiled. They were not smiling meanly at her overshoes or her hat. None of this was Vera’s business.
Vera chewed on a drumstick, and told what had happened in Rome. She had found her friend Al Wiczinski living with a French family in a crummy unheated palazzo. He was adored by the daughter of the family, aged seventeen, and also by her father. Al was just too nice to people. But he was coming to Alsace. (“Coincidence, eh, Lottie?”) A college had been opened for refugees in Strasbourg, and Al had been offered a teaching job. Politics, in a way, said Vera, but mostly the culture racket. After all, teaching Slav lit to a bunch of Slavs was what, culture or politics? Radio Free Europe was running the place. Lottie had never heard of it. Vera glanced at her oddly. Al had been told that he could obtain the visa he needed in Colmar more easily than in Strasbourg, and had sent Vera on to see what she could do. In theory, Al was not allowed to live along any frontier, especially this one.
“Why not?”
“Don’t ask me. Ask the police.”
“I don’t see why a Canadian should have any trouble,” said Lottie.
“He’s only sort of Canadian,” said Vera. “If you ask me, I don’t think he should have a passport. I mean, he sort of picks on the place.”
“You can’t be sort of Canadian. If he is, he doesn’t have to be in trouble anywhere.”
“Oh, come off it, Lottie,” said Vera, smiling at her. “Suppose you had to explain what you were doing here this very minute, what would you say?”
Lottie gave up. Sulking and pale, she let Vera glance at her several times but would not say what the matter was. She thought she had been taken in.
After dinner they walked beside a black gelatinous canal in which stood, upside down, a row of crooked houses. Lottie said, “Sometimes I think I’ve got no brains.”
“You’ve got brains, all right,” said Vera.
“No.” Out of the protective dark she spoke to upside-down houses. “I�
�ve got a good memory. I can remember anything. But I’ve never worked on my own.”
Lottchen. When she stuffed her mouth full of candy, her mother knew it had been taken without permission, but the boys were scolded instead of the little girl. Why? Oh, yes – they had put her up to it. Captain von Hook told them what he thought of it, in a high and frightening voice. He was meant to be principal of his school, but after 1939 his career was blocked.
The promenade along the canal ended Lottie’s first evening in Alsace. She and Vera parted in the hotel lobby – Vera was going to stay and converse with total strangers in the bar – and without waiting to see if this was all right with Lottie she kissed her good night.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, Vera rose at seven and, after shaking Lottie awake, dragged her – cold, stunned, already weary – into streets where pale lamps flickered and aboard a bus filled with pale people asleep. They rolled into dark hills, which, as the day lightened, became blotter green. Lottie was not yet accustomed to steep hills and valleys; she wanted them to be more beautiful than they were. Desolate, she shut her eyes, believing herself close to a dead faint. She heard a girl cry “C’est épouvantable,” but it was only because an elderly Alsatian peasant could not speak French. In the town of Munster, they descended before a shuttered hotel. The dining room was closed, glacial – Lottie had a glimpse of stacked chairs. In the kitchen a maid was ironing sheets, while another fed two little boys bread in the shape of men with pointed heads and feet. Vera ordered red wine and cheese for breakfast, and asked the price of rooms. Lottie wondered why. The wine stung and burned, the cheese made her lips swell. One day she would tell Vera about her low blood pressure, and how her temperature was often lower than normal, too, and she would let Vera understand how selfish and thoughtless she had been. On their way out through the courtyard, Vera banged on a door marked “Pissoir.” Lottie walked on. “You’ll have to get over being fussy,” Vera remarked. Lottie affected not to hear. She concentrated on the view of Munster, smoke and blue in a hollow. Above the town a blue gap broke open the metal sky. They set off downhill over wet earth and melting snow. Lottie walked easily in her comic overshoes, but Vera was pitched forward by the heels on her Italian shoes. They saw no one except a troop of little boys in sabots and square blue caps who engulfed them, fell silent, giggled after they had gone by. A snowball struck the back of Vera’s cape. The boy who had thrown it wore rimless glasses and was absolutely cross-eyed. “Brat,” said Lottie, who did not care for children. But Vera laughed back at him and put out her tongue.
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