Her family had had money, she explained, and had lived out in the country beyond the city, in a villa with some land. They had been evicted and relocated in the city. I had heard some of this story already, but never the details.
“For us, it wasn’t so bad, really. We had a big enough flat on Marszalkowska Boulevard—my two younger brothers, father, mother, and Aunt Wanda, who lived with us. Uncles and their families coming up for dinner sometimes on Sundays. We had enough food. My father had some sort of connections and we had enough food, even wine sometimes with meals, and schnapps and vodka. It wasn’t the way it used to be out in the country where we lived. But I made some friends. I even knew that officer from the German Army. We would talk. He was smart, and I think he too came from money.”
She knew perfectly well there were hideous atrocities going on in the Warsaw Ghetto: “Who couldn’t know?” she said. And there were periodic bombings and skirmishes in the streets between the partisans and the occupiers, and of course there was the Ghetto Uprising itself, in 1943. But all that had been contained, more or less separated from her world. Then it all changed after 1944, after the Warsaw Uprising.
The familiar world was turned upside down. The days didn’t differ from one to another in that season in hell, she said.
“Howls of bombs, airplanes, roarings in the sky, and our building, it just shook like a rat in the jaws of a terrier one night. Our whole building. Windows crashing, clattering all around, and out in the streets, the smoke and fires—smoke first, then the little tongues of flames, and then whole walls of flame. What a terrible night that was, people running everywhere, dead animals, and Aunt Wanda moaning: ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Oh my God, Sacred Heart of Christ,’ she says, ‘oh my God.’ Even back then, I am thinking, what does God have to do with all this? This is hell itself.
“But then it stopped, and we went outside and walked around in the dark ashes and the smoke, and while we’re out there, comes another howling, like evil bats or predatory birds, and then the thuds all around the city. You hear the noise, first the roaring, then the whining, then the thud and the explosions. I don’t know, in some ways I was angry with the partisans. Why didn’t they just leave it all alone, the Jews in their ghettos, the Nazis in our streets? Nazis in our best restaurants, why not just carry on? And just then, low over the building, a big bomber roars over. It was huge and all dark with widespread wings; it was evil incarnate, and then I was thinking, my God, what can you do but fight that. The brave partisans, just kids really. Your age. We lost. German tanks everywhere finishing things off, great smoldering piles where apartment buildings once stood, courtyards where children once played, courtyards, windows, doors, twisted pipes, all in a heap. One building I saw had a bathtub hanging from a standing wall by its pipes, as if it too had been executed, like all the other partisans. The whole city in ruins with people picking through the rubble, looking for potatoes, for coal bits, for evidence of loved ones, maybe. They lost, the partisans. The city lost. Hitler wanted to make an example of Warsaw. Maybe two hundred thousand people dead, no place to sleep for the living, no food.
“We were all in a shelter one night, I remember, my family and I, and someone came in and said they had hit Sisters of the Sacrament.”
She blew out her breath and laughed cynically.
“What an irony, that. Those were the nuns who had voluntarily sealed themselves up against the world. Young women, they would go in there, away from the temporal world, behind grated doors and windows, away from secular life altogether. They thought they could find peace. You go in, take the vows, and you never come out. You’re safe. They sang hymns to God and chorales, they held communions, they prayed, they dressed in white and lived a spiritual life, waiting for ascension or salvation from sin or whatever it is they believed in. They were fools, weren’t they? Along come the German shells and lay bare their sanctuary; the walls collapse, the interior is revealed, and we see dead nuns in the rubble, still in their virginal whites.
“You see what I mean? Nothing saved. Nothing sacred. Nothing untouched by that deadly rain, and don’t think I am the only one who dreams of a rain of fire, anybody who was there must have the same repetitive dream; they just don’t talk about it.”
She looked off at the sea. All across the black waters, the white breakers were winking on and off.
“I was only eighteen when it rained …” she said. Her voice cracked.
I couldn’t say anything. The light had faded. The joy in the clink of ice in a summer glass. A flight of sparrows. Her curiosity.
After a few minutes’ silence I said that I had better go back to bed, on the excuse that I always had to get up early to make Pierrot’s coffee.
“Yes, that’s excellent. Make his coffee for him tomorrow morning. That sounds so good. Maybe I’ll join you. It’s all right. I’m sorry,” she said. “It was the wrong time.”
“Will you be all right?” I asked.
“Of course. Awake, out here, with the scrambling sea. What can possibly go wrong? It’s sleep that’s dangerous,” she said.
chapter eleven
Le Baron According to André
Jean-Pierre came in from the market with a load of local, grass-fed beef a few days after the libeccio dropped, and Vincenzo set to preparing it for a local dish of veal with wild mushrooms—not a typical item on the Rose Café menu. He braised the veal in eau-de-vie and olive oil, then cooked up a few slices of onion and garlic, put back the veal with a few crushed tomatoes, and sautéed it a little more, whereupon he dumped in white wine, another dash of eau-de-vie, and a handful of herbs from the maquis, and then let the whole thing stew. Later he sautéed the mushrooms and stirred them in.
The pot was sitting there on the stove, and as I passed I couldn’t help dipping in a hunk of bread to taste it, a trick I had learned from the cardplayers, who would always come sniffing around in the kitchen tasting the dishes if they happened to arrive early.
The sauce had that heady flavor of the wild forest.
I noticed that André had been coming out earlier and earlier during those weeks, and I would often see him at the bar with Peter and Maggs and Herr Komandante, chatting in that odd polyglot combination of languages that the international guests at the Rose Café seemed to be able to assume whenever they wanted to socialize. The man who called himself Dushko happened to be there that night, although he was staying someplace else back in the town.
Of all the periodic visitors at the café, Dushko was the most linguistically versatile; he spoke most of the Romance languages, as well as German and a couple of Slavic languages, and even, I was told by another guest, Hungarian—an impossible language with no apparent relatives in Europe other than a vague association with Finnish and Estonian.
Conversation at the bar was lively but required a little help with translation for André, who spoke only French and the local patois, plus a little Italian. I noticed that Maggs, who was fluent in French, as well as Russian, German, and Polish, was acting as his translator. And I also noticed that she seemed to be filling out the intent of the conversation and the innuendos, as well as the literal words, and that André seemed surprisingly interested in what was being said, so much so that he managed to draw her away into a conversation of their own.
Peter, who was ever the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman, also spoke French and remained above it all, commenting politely and laughing at the appropriate moments. At one point, when the conversation turned to fish, he joined in. He was an avid spear fisherman. In fact that’s about all he did, unless the wind was up. On those days he read in the corner of the dining room, nursing a pot of tea.
They were all chatting there happily when le Baron came in. He greeted everyone, ordered a drink, and at one point in the chatter, asked me to tell Jean-Pierre that he would be having dinner that night with Dushko, whereupon the two of them ordered another round and retreated to a table far out on the terrace.
“Who is that guy?” André asked Maggs, as Dushko left
.
“I don’t know, but he speaks Polish,” she said. “I can’t place his accent, though. German I think.”
“But he has an accent in German, too,” Herr Komandante said.
“And in French,” André added.
“He’s probably Czech or Hungarian,” Peter suggested. “One of those blokes who gets uprooted, flees his country, drifts around Europe picking up languages, working for whoever will pay, and then can’t figure out where he belongs after the war.”
They all stared out at the terrace where le Baron and Dushko were now seated.
“Cards tonight, André?” Maggs asked, indifferently.
“But of course. Cards every night.”
“Don’t you chaps have anything else to do?” Peter asked.
The tone, as far as I could determine, was neutral. But André glanced at him before answering, fixing him with a mean squint.
“We are all friends,” he said. “Friends play cards.”
They turned their attention to the terrace again.
Dushko was leaning across the table toward le Baron, speaking with animation, cupping his fingers upward in the southern Italian style, flailing his left hand in the air. Le Baron was smoking lazily, eyeing Dushko through the smoke.
“What do you think it’s all about?” I asked from the other side of the bar.
“Money,” André answered without pause and without turning from the scene on the terrace. “He’s probably trying to float a loan.”
“How do you know that?” Maggs asked.
“I know le Baron,” André said.
“Where is le Baron from?” Peter asked in all innocence. “I thought I heard an accent in French.”
“He says he’s Belgian, but who knows?” André said. “Could be German, too. Alsatian maybe. Von Metz, or whatever his name is. He’s just another con artist. On the lam, found a good place to hide.”
No one was overly interested in this definitive bit of news but me. They went back to their small talk. André engaged Maggs. Peter ordered another beer; Herr Komandante sipped his muscat and watched the incoming dinner guests.
“Does le Baron speak German?” I asked Herr Komandante.
“I don’t think so—not to me, anyway,” he said. “But who knows?”
In due time Maggs and Peter departed for their table, leaving André and the Komandante. Karen and her troupe arrived and engaged Herr Komandante, who, I noticed, seemed to have an eye for young Laurent.
“You think le Baron is a swindler?” I managed to ask André. “You sure?”
“But of course. Big-time smuggler and forger. You didn’t know? He was a double agent during the war. He was connected to the communists and the bandit gangs up in the Dordogne. Soleil and that crowd, you know, political but criminal at the same time.”
Soleil, I learned, was a criminal turned resistance fighter from the Marseille area. He was just one of any number of underworld figures, many of them Corsican, who had joined the legitimate resistance fighters and used their art to aid the cause. The Free French and the British were not opposed to cooperating.
“He could also have been working with the Gaullist network,” André added. “He was educated in London, speaks good English, and used to arrange shipments from the British SOE, the Security Office; they trusted him. But then he would manage to allow the criminal gangs to get to the air drops first. That’s where he learned his trade. Then he started selling arms to whoever would pay. And then after the war …”
André waved his hand, indicating that after the war le Baron simply carried on his trade.
“He first came out here during the war to hide out. Things must have gotten hot for him on the continent, and maybe the British were after him as well as the Germans. He was up in the maquis somewhere, and he liked it here. So after the war he comes back with a younger woman and buys that big villa out there. She’s a recluse, spends all her time in the garden. I don’t think anyone has ever even seen her. Except maybe Jean-Pierre.”
I looked back at the terrace. Le Baron and Dushko were sharing a big, high-piled bowl of urchins, stripping out the meat with narrow little forks and tearing off hunks of bread. They ate slowly, and were sharing a cold bottle of local white. Whatever subject had so animated Dushko seemed to have been resolved.
chapter twelve
The Artful Dodger
I had heard from Pierrot that somewhere up behind the village of Speloncata, where there were some interesting grottoes, there were thought to be some menhirs and torri. His directions were vague, and he wasn’t even sure they were located near Speloncata, but on one of those hot days when a sojourn in the mountains is refreshing, I took off.
As the summer wore on, I managed to negotiate free days for myself by arranging—with Chrétien’s help—to have Karen take over my position one day a week as dishwasher. I would often take advantage of these times and go off by myself into the hills. Pierrot would give me a ride on his moto to the edge of town, and I would either walk or sometimes hitchhike higher and higher into the mountain slopes beyond the maquis, and then return before dusk, in time for dinner.
On this particular day, I hitched a ride on the back of a truck that dropped me in the hills somewhere south of Ile Rousse and began a long, more or less pointless walk, following donkey trails now and then in those sections that vaguely resembled the descriptions Pierrot had given me. In one village, Pioggiola, I stopped at the one café there and had a coffee and asked about the monuments. No one knew anything about them, but they suggested the next village. So I hiked on.
The roads became more and more rutted and the villages, such as they were, more and more run-down—some were mere piles of stones, half in ruins and inhabited, it seemed to me, only by old people and middle-aged women with gaunt faces and scraggly hairdos. In one collection of houses, a crone with a W-shaped mouth was sitting in a chair in the sun, and as I walked by she uttered a long, incomprehensible sentence in dialect and then cackled maliciously and shook her finger at me. I stopped and asked her in Italian—the closest language I had to the local dialect—if she knew about any stoneworks in the area. She pointed at me, continued to shake her finger in warning, and strewed out a long unintelligible answer. I thought I caught just one word: morte, “death,” and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was a mazzera and was warning me not to continue.
Nevertheless, I waved and hiked on. I was clearly a long way from the cosmopolitan terrace of the Rose Café and the busy town square at Ile Rousse.
The old woman was not out of place here, and in fact was mild compared with some of the other characters that appear in Corsican history and legend. Homer had identified half-wild, man-eating giants on Corsica. Seneca, who was banished to the island in AD 41, portrayed the place as a barren, rocky wasteland—without sustenance. Balzac, who was stranded in Ajaccio at one point, praised the beauty of the island—as did the ancient Greek merchant sailors—but Balzac felt the interior was inhabited by a somber, paranoid race that isolated itself in a mountain fastness. Flaubert passed through Corsica the same year as Mérimée and, like Mérimée, enjoyed the lawless freedom of the people of the maquis, although he perhaps tended to place them in the same romanticized category as Rousseau’s natural man. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Corsican Brothers, also overemphasized the romance of the place.
In fact, life on Corsica was never easy: The land is not suited to agriculture because of the mountainous terrain; sustenance was hard-won; and, as in isolated cultures the world around, the local people tended to be withdrawn and suspicious of snooping foreigners. Nevertheless, from the perspective of an outsider, the island does have a flair of the exotic—the nearest of the far-flung places, as the English used to claim: great green peaks rising above the scented foothills, misty chasms, waterfalls and rushing streams, rocky sea coves and isolated sandy beaches; and handsome, dark-eyed men in black corduroy and bright red sashes, women in flowing dark skirts and the traditional messera, a long, flowing mantilla. And also
danger. Armed men, even at church, and powerful, possibly treacherous women (Colomba carried a stiletto inside her messera). Mérimée managed to evoke all this and at the same time portray the tough realities of life in the interior.
All this is not to say that Corsicans themselves did not have a local poetic tradition. There were a few urban writers who attempted to portray the island life, but they were perhaps too close to their world to give an accurate perspective. There was also a regional tradition of improvised verse performed by a voceratrice, a woman who invented rhymed laments over a body at a ritual wake. These imaginative verses can go on at length, and they were still being practiced when I was there. One of the last voceratrice was interviewed in the mid-1960s by the best of the modern-day interpreters of Corsican life, Dorothy Carrington, for her seminal book Corsica: Portrait of a Granite Island. Carrington’s voceratrice explained that it was not she herself who was singing, but that the voices came to her from the other side.
Beyond the last village on a spur road, the track gave out altogether, and I began following a sheep trail that ran up into the hard foothills. After an hour or so of hiking, skirting all the while a great, granite, east-facing escarpment, I came upon evidence of another dying island tradition, a stone hovel, rounded, with a corbelled roof. From a distance I thought this could have been the ruins of a torri, but when I drew closer, I could see that this pile of stones was actually a shepherd’s summer quarters. There was bedding inside, and there was a well-used cooking ring of stone nearby.
Transhumance herding was still going on in the mountains in Corsica at this time. Each winter the shepherds would graze their flocks in the lowlands near the coast, where the pastures were green and snow-free. As soon as the snows melted back from the high pastures, they would bring the flocks up, a journey that could take as much as a week or two. The sheep would spend the summer feeding on the fresh, snow-fed grasses in the high meadows, and then, with the first frosts, start to move down to the coast again.
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