Quartet for the End of Time

by Johanna Skibsrud

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE retrieved body was not lost on German intelligence, either, of course. Little did they know, however—so close had “the end of the war” begun to feel for them, in March 1944—the way in which this particular piece of the puzzle, which seemed to have landed so gratuitously in their lap, would, rather than secure their ultimate victory, spell their defeat. Because Alden instantly recognized that the body of the “lieutenant colonel” was in fact the body of quite altogether another man, and held therefore altogether quite another meaning—he was already a step ahead of the rest of German intelligence. Though they took precautions, and followed what leads they could to reassure themselves of the “lieutenant colonel’s” identity, and therefore of the validity of the documents he carried, their investigations inevitably hit an impasse, which Alden was at liberty to overstep. From the beginning, his own attention and energies were directed instead to the question of why a false body, carrying what were therefore unquestionably false documents, had been employed in the service of the British Marines. It goes without saying—and later, he would make a point of emphasizing it— that this was a question he kept to himself.

  SUCH ELABORATE IN TELLIGENCE HOAXES were not at all unheard of. Alden knew for a fact that they had been, on several other occasions, attempted by the Allies (and on several occasions—this was how he knew of them, after all—they had been foiled). It was with curiosity and delight that he now watched the Germans assess the bogus documents they found on the “lieutenant colonel’s” person—outlining plans of an Allied attack, which only he could know they never had any intentions of making—and come no closer to discovering the manner or extent to which they had already been fooled.

  There is, you see, the inherent impossibility, just as in mathematics, not of any truth being recognized, or expressed as such, but of its being expressed within the same system that has been designed to expose it. Because, you see, as Alden insisted later, the Germans—though at times obtuse—were certainly not stupid. Indeed, he couldn’t fault them in the very thorough investigation they subsequently carried out. It never ceased to astound him (he said), the artistry that went into the whole affair! Here was a man constructed by Allied intelligence—a complete and utter fiction!—and yet there was no loose end for the Germans to catch hold of, no irregularity in the details on which the story snagged.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Gordon Rawlings” carried with him not only the crucial documents that revealed the false plans of attack designed to fatally upset the German offensive (plans which, despite their falseness, succeeded in their stated aim), but letters from his “mother” and “wife” in Hampshire—both of whom, when they were contacted by undercover German agents, claimed, indeed, to be the bereaved next of kin to this “lieutenant colonel,” who never in fact existed at all! Even a receipt for a guesthouse in London that was found on the “lieutenant colonel,” when the guesthouse records were looked into, was verified by the neat signature of a certain “lieutenant colonel” next to the date indicated on the receipt itself. The “lieutenant colonel” was a fiction constructed so carefully, and with such minute attention to detail, that he aligned perfectly with the known and established “facts” of the world he was invented to alter. At least from the perspective of the Germans.

  But you see, that was the whole thing! The success of it lay in a careful consideration of perspective: what it would be possible to make the Germans believe. As Alden would later attest, every cover operation rests on this principle: on a compromise, that is, between the ideal cover and what the enemy will actually believe. In many cases, the best strategy was simply to tell the truth—only then to give some indication that it could no longer be trusted. It was of utmost importance that, whatever this indication was, the enemy would notice it—but that it would never prove so noticeable he might actually recognize it as such. The other crucial element was that the information at any point accessible to the enemy be—at least for the most part—information with which he was already familiar: the average mind, after all, is only prepared to understand, let alone accept, that which contains a large percentage of what it already knows. You have to think about that very deeply: What sort of background and assumptions might a person have—a person just like you, but on the opposite end of things, who is presented with the same situation? What will matter to him? You have to think about what questions he would ask and give him the answers that would satisfy not you, but him.

  PERHAPS IF SUCCESS HAD not already, for the Germans, been so flavorfully on the tongue, things would have turned out differently. The documents retrieved from the “lieutenant colonel,” even once his identity was no longer in question, might have been treated with more circumspection and concern. But there is, in victory, or in its expectancy, a tendency— even more than usual—to read things at face value. And so, as far as Alden was aware, once the veracity of the “lieutenant colonel’s” identity was confirmed, there was very little circumspection over the documents he carried with him. There was no apparent code to decipher, no trick to the document at all—which was of course the first thing you would think would raise questions among the security department; but it did not. So assured of their own success were they, the Germans quite readily accepted the blunders of their adversaries as simple error. But there was another, larger error that escaped them, and that was the one they had already made.

  THE DAYS PASSED AND Alden spoke to no one—not even to the poet Maurice Bonheur (their friendship had anyway cooled after their misadventure with Emil Gabor). He still saw Marie-Claude, but his sustained neutrality in the affair had, just as he’d suspected, begun to take its toll, and there was, each time she took her leave, an increased terseness in her gesture and tone. Alden knew it was only a matter of time before an ultimate terseness would conclude their relations, and with them every chance of his personal happiness. It was not without regret that, over the course of the winter and spring of 1944, he watched those chances slowly diminish until finally (though he and Marie-Claude continued their at least several times weekly ascent and descent up and down seven flights of stairs) they ceased to exist at all.

  He grew accustomed, instead, to his private evenings—in which, after Marie-Claude’s departure, if she had indeed come, he drank steadily at Marcello’s bar. Though he considered this time “private” and appreciated it as such, he was never alone at Marcello’s. Far from it. The bar was always filled with men, nearly all of whom were veterans, and in some way incapacitated; some more obviously than others. Most (like Marcello himself) were missing limbs, but there was also a blind man, an epileptic, and—the strangest case—an attractive young Bretagne man, otherwise healthy, who, after the Battle of Oran off the Algerian coast, had developed a bad case of Tourette’s. Intermittently, he would let out a bark, like a dog—an affliction that rendered him more or less useless as a Vichy soldier. He had been returned to Paris and now worked in the mailroom, where he was free to bark as much as he wished while sorting through the piles of letters returned from his comrades at the front who were no longer receiving any mail.

  On a few occasions, when a new patron entered the bar, heard the unfortunate sounds the young man made, and answered with a bark of his own, Marcello—who looked after all of his regular patrons like a devoted don—would turn on the offender, and, with his one expressive eye (the left side of his face had been permanently frozen by a botched surgery that had once sought to repair a demolished cheekbone), communicate so much information that only once as far as Alden was ever aware was he required to do any further explaining. It was not long before all of Marcello’s patrons, not just the regulars, learned to accept the young man’s eccentricity.

  It was among this company that Alden spent most evenings, overhearing the spattered stories of those men returned from the front, and the whispered rumors of the end of the war. And it was among this company that he celebrated the end of the war when it did come, as if by a miracle, in early August of that year, 1944.

&n
bsp; He recalled later the blank looks on the faces of the administrative staff at the Hôtel Lutetia. The closed doors, the periodic slamming of telephones; from time to time a raised voice. Aside from that, and considering the sudden, extreme reversal of circumstances with which they were all confronted, it was amazing how calm everyone remained. All through that day the German tanks rolled through the streets, papers were burned, and finally—the office was closed.

  The streets, as Alden walked home that evening, were unspeakably quiet—a stark contrast to the noise that greeted him as he arrived at Marcello’s bar, where Marcello—teetering on his single leg—was keeping up marvelously with the almost constant demand for champagne and wine.

  At first it was difficult to get any news at all. There was just a dull roar, everyone speaking at once—not caring if they were speaking or being spoken to, or what was said, or if anyone heard. Alden spent most of the night shouting back and forth with a soldier recently returned from Algeria, where he had been blinded by the detonation of a fuel-air bomb. The soldier recalled for Alden those first days of blindness in a hospital in Algiers. When they first brought him in from the field, he said, they had just received news that Benny Goodman was dead. All night long he heard the news repeated, over and over, and the sound of it seemed to echo more resoundingly because he couldn’t see. And if you could only imagine the darkness: it was worse than blackness, he said. Did Alden know that? That blindness was not actually black, but gray? It was, the blind man said, just a dimness, which kept everything at such a distance, impossible to diminish, that whatever suggested itself to the eye (as things did, almost continuously) was doomed to remain forever unattainable, unknown. He himself, he assured Alden, had not known this until he had gone blind! One supposed—he continued—one could only suppose—that in time he would become accustomed to the relative distance and aloofness of image and form and not tire himself out anymore in the search of it. That he would establish instead a new system of interpretation that made sense of shapes not according to the forms the inner eye would have them become (as though they might correspond to the images he had for so long been accustomed to), but in terms that corresponded to the very absent shape the eye sought. That filled in the value of that shape through logical equation, much the way that an x (though it in no way serves to solve the problem) still manages to balance two terms of a mathematical equation by providing the possibility of agreement between them. But this was not yet so, he said, and even now—did Alden realize it?—Alden was himself only a dim shape the soldier was, in his mind’s eye, searching after. Did he realize that even now, in regarding Alden as he spoke, the blind man was under constant strain, because of the way that Alden failed to correspond to his own possibility? That he was but an apparition, an imbalanced equation, not the resolution—leave that to the mathematicians!—but just the x of which the soldier would always now be constantly in search? And all of this was no less the case, the blind man said, but more so, on that first night of his blindness, in the hospital in Algiers, when he learned that Benny Goodman was dead. Even with how the news was repeated over and over again, he was so unsure of everything on account of his blindness that every time he heard it, it was as if for the first time. Benny Goodman must have died over one hundred and fifty times that night, the blind man said, and each time it struck him anew as a most unconscionable loss. He had, you see, up until that point, even through the worst of the war, been able to maintain a sense that there existed, beyond his immediate experience, a stable outside world unaffected by war, where all was still promised; now he realized, with a shudder, every time he heard the news, that that promise itself was not infallible. Benny Goodman was dead!

  Of course, later, the blind man said, they would learn that Benny Goodman was alive and well, living in New York. His death had been only a rumor—its source unknown. He should have been suspicious, of course. It was not uncommon for such rumors to spread, and indeed, it would have been impossible to count the number of celebrities who had died and been resurrected again during the war. It was almost as though the rumors generated themselves for the sake of the comfort and relief of learning, eventually, that Benny Goodman, or Ingrid Bergman, or Bing Crosby, or Vera Lynn, were indeed alive and well—untouched by war. And even in the course of the conversation Alden sustained with the blind soldier, which was repeatedly interrupted by the profound blasphemies uttered by Marcello at the bar as he poured from what appeared to have been, against all expectation, all that time, an unlimited supply of wine, the blind man’s words—Benny Goodman is dead—were picked up and circulated, so that in among the chorus of celebration there was a new note—one of alarm and genuine sorrow, but also a certain appreciation. The words gave shape to an injustice of particular dimensions, which could be immediately shared and understood. And so, though at first when the blind soldier heard the rumor he himself had inadvertently resurrected echoed back to him, he had shouted, Benny Goodman vit! Il vit toujours!, after a while he gave up—in any case, his words made no impression now. The single phrase, Benny Goodman is dead, continued to mix in, and for a while lend shape, to the dull roar of the crowd—punctuating it with sudden bursts, if not of truth, then of intelligible meaning. Soon everyone seemed to be chanting it, and finally even Alden and the blind man joined in—as at last they, too, began to understand its place there.

  —

  IN ALL OF THE CONFUSION THAT AFTERNOON, ALDEN HAD ENTIR ELY forgotten his appointment to meet Marie-Claude—and then the next day, and the next, when he did go to meet her, she failed to appear. Three days passed, and each day that she failed to appear at the usual hour, Alden’s heart beat with greater insistency and longing. He willed her to come—but she did not. Finally, when he could bear it no longer, and heedless of snipers who still peppered the streets with occasional fire, he picked up his bicycle and went flying, all the way to Franz Eckelmann’s flat on the Rue de Vaugirard.

  —

  WHO IS IT?

  It was Marie-Thérèse who asked from behind the closed door.

  Alden informed her, but the door did not immediately open.

  I’m looking for Marie-Claude, Alden said, though this was something that would have been immediately clear.

  The door opened a crack. Marie-Thérèse peered out—Alden could see just a single sharp cheekbone as it gave way to an angular jaw. The rest of her face was either obscured by the thick door or fell into shadow.

  She isn’t in, Marie-Thérèse said. Her voice sounded strangely mechanical and cold.

  Alden said he would wait.

  No—no, Marie-Thérèse said. Now her voice broke and trembled on the word. No, she said again. You mustn’t do that.

  Her words—something in the way her voice had trembled on them (a timbre that was far more forbidding than the cold, mechanical sound that had echoed within it just moments before)—filled Alden, suddenly, with agonizing dread. It was a feeling not unlike absolute desire; that point at which it becomes a physical thing; pressing with such maddening force from within that at last the body can no longer bear the pressure, and—

  I must see her! Alden said, attempting to push past Marie-Thérèse at the door. But Marie-Thérèse, with surprising strength, held it firm. Still, he had managed to wedge himself partway into the door frame and so now could see Marie-Thérèse more clearly—could see, glowing there, in her eyes—it was unmistakable—a hatred that bordered on madness.

  He was so startled he almost withdrew his position. But he did not.

  Let me see her, he said—though now his own voice trembled.

  No.

  Listen— Alden said, but he discovered, suddenly, that he had nothing to say. No words with which to defend himself. He had been terribly amiss, it was true. He realized it in a wave. But all that—he had never felt more certain of anything before in his life—would change now! He felt it deeply: a firm resolve, which he could not possibly explain to Marie-Thérèse. If he could only—

  He plunged into the dark hall
. Once he decided to, it was easy. Marie-Thérèse’s weight gave easily away.

  You can’t see her, she won’t be seen, she called out after him—but by that time he was already well past her, heading toward the darkened room where Franz Eckelmann, as usual, gazed out the window toward the empty courtyard where nothing, as far as he was concerned, had changed in seventy years.

  When Alden entered the room, the old man’s face clouded with the first signs of confusion as he attempted to make sense of his unexpected guest—but Alden did not pause long enough for him to do so, continuing on down the long hall, which led, he knew (though he had never ventured there), to Marie-Claude’s room. In the long period of time before she allowed him to sleep with her, he could not help but keep its doorway in view, at least peripherally, on each of his visits to the house— imagining the clandestine space where as a child she had caught fire, and within which she had always slept alone, perfect and (except for the flame and her father’s hands, which had, once, descended upon her in order to extinguish them) untouched.

  It was through this doorway he burst, and there saw, as he knew that he would, Marie-Claude. He could not say later, even with the state he found her in, that it was not still a relief to see her. The abstract fear and longing that had driven him through the house was much worse than anything real, though it was indeed terrible what he saw, and if he had not known that no other possibility existed but that the body that lay on the bed before him in Marie-Claude’s room (that sacred space into which, at last, he had penetrated, which he knew to be hers alone) was indeed Marie-Claude’s, he would not have recognized her.