The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  “Jealous pigeons?”

  “Be quiet, you little clown. No one thinks you’re funny. I’m trying to warn you about your jealous side. It’ll get you into trouble.”

  “And today’s the day to warn me?”

  “Ja, today. No better day for it. The sun is shining, the sky above Berlin is bursting with springtime, your birthday is coming up, you think you’re unhappy. There’s no better time. You’ll feel better afterward. You’ll realize that things could be worse, after all.”

  At that, I stood up and rummaged around in my jeans for my key. It wasn’t there.

  “They said you lost it in the bathroom back at the tavern. The locksmith can’t come until tomorrow. It’s either my sofa or Hilde’s, but her lover’s coming over tonight and I’ve never heard her expressing any interest in a ménage à trois.”

  “Be quiet and give me back my key.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s at the bottom of a Prenzlauer Berg sewer, Kapriel. Go on, have a glass of Riesling. It will help you get a hold of yourself.”

  My dear brother, Magda went on to tell me the story you’ll find in the two notebooks I’ve put in with these letters. I’m still in shock. I tried to stay as faithful as I could to everything Magda told me. That way you’ll be able to feel the full force of the story for yourself.

  I’m sending it to you because I want to share a very moving story with you. This woman is a bit like your reflection. You have the same interests, you’re both into Puccini, and as I’ve seen for myself, you both have a bass clef birthmark in exactly the same spot. She’s like a lost sister of yours, Michel. Closer to you than to me, that much is clear. I’m taking the time to write down her story and send it to you because I’m quite sure it contains some sort of warning for us.

  She was wrong anyway. I’ve never been so consumed by Claudia than since I heard her story.

  Gabriel

  Magdalena Berg’s First Notebook

  I HAVEN’T TOLD YOU about my parents, Kapriel. They loved me for the longest time. They still love me from where they are now, no doubt about it. You don’t know the first thing about my hometown, I’m sure. I’m from Königsberg. In East Prussia. Just try talking about East Prussia with a German, Kapriel. They know precious little about it. “It used to be part of Germany,” is about the best you’ll get. Most will tell you all they know about Königsberg is the meatballs, Königsberger Klopse. My father was from over there, from Cranz, on the shores of the Curonian Spit. Do you know of it? He was the one who wanted me to be called Magdalena. It was a common name in our family, he said. The Bergs always had to have at least one living Magdalena. But I can tell by your eyes that you couldn’t even place East Prussia on a map. The Baltic Sea? Lithuania? Ring any bells? Poland? Whatever do they teach you at school in Canada? Do you at least know where you are today? I’m talking about old Poland, not the country that the Russian tanks pushed westward in 1945. East Prussia was Germany on the Baltic Sea. Today it’s Russia. Three million Germans lived in that little country for centuries, beside the Masurian Lakes, in Königsberg, and on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Perhaps it looks like a country you already know beside the sea. To the north. In East Prussia, Kapriel, it’s one beautiful beach after another. Two long strips of land jut out into the Baltic: the Curonian Spit to the east and the Vistula Spit to the west. The two strips of sand are three hundred meters wide and at least one hundred kilometers long; between them there are two narrow stretches of fresh water that freeze over in winter. The peninsula’s sand dunes are like mountains. They shift slowly in the wind. Between those two enormous sand dunes, Kapriel, there are wonderful pine forests, where deer run wild. I saw them when I was small! My mother came from Königsberg. She was a real Prussian and learned French at school. “Every young girl should be able to speak French,” she’d tell me. I think she must have met the Kaiser himself when she was a child. The Prussian emperors were crowned in Königsberg, did you know that? That’s where I was born. On Schrötterstraße, not too far from the zoo. I remember the old city of Königsberg well. My father helped run a theater there. He was an entrepreneur, too, and he owned two cinemas. When I was fourteen, in 1934, he announced to my mother he’d been transferred to the Reich’s capital in Berlin. Well, not exactly transferred . . . He’d been taken on by Kraft durch Freude, ever heard of it? No? Kraft durch Freude was a big group of German workers from the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Kraft durch Freude, or Strength through Joy, became the world’s biggest entertainment provider in the 1930s. The world’s biggest, Kapriel. We like to say that all the time in Germany: the world’s biggest. We love excess. The world’s biggest book fair, the best beer in the universe, the most terrifying dictator in history, the mother of all orchestras, the war to end all wars. German excess, all of it. Kraft durch Freude. The Germans called it KdF, three letters that were synonymous with vacations, theater, music, and Mediterranean cruises. Every worker in Germany could pay in each month, and in return enjoy discount travel across the Reich. Prussians would travel by train to the Alps, while Bavarians went to swim in the Baltic Sea. They were Germany’s first organized vacations. But KdF was much more too . . . My father, for example, was one of the first Prussians from Königsberg to travel thanks to KdF: he was sent to the Salzburg Festival in 1934. It was a dream come true for a man who loved music like he did. I also traveled a lot thanks to Strength through Joy, but first I have to tell you how we arrived in Berlin. My mother was far from enamored with the city. I think it frightened her a little. She found the people impolite and poorly educated, and she had no patience for the communist plebs running loose in the streets. My father had a hard time persuading her to move there. She had her conditions. Funnily enough, it wasn’t the promise of a huge apartment or nights out at the opera that made Mama change her mind, it was the assassination of Röhm in 1934. Nothing disgusted or frightened her more than disorder. Even though she was far from a fan of Adolf Hitler, to her mind Röhm’s death brought an end to the chaos. And Berlin was such a violent city that Mama was frightened for herself and for me. “I don’t want to go to Berlin, it’s full of communists,” she’d told Papa. Most people in Königsberg, it must be said, backed the Führer. I was fourteen and didn’t know much about what was going on. Papa had told me, with a gleam in his eye, about the Reich’s capital, its three opera houses, its theaters, its cabarets, and the Berlin lifestyle. But Mama wouldn’t hear of it. “You won’t have me living among Bolsheviks, Alfred!” Then came the Night of the Long Knives in summer 1934. Ever hear of it? No? Ach . . . Gott! And you were planning on marrying a German girl, Kapriel?

  I’ll spare you the details. Back then, I knew nothing at all about the Night of the Long Knives; that kind of thing didn’t interest me in the slightest. All I know is that in September 1934, my mother agreed to move to Berlin. Papa was overjoyed. “You’ll love it, you’ll see,” he told me. Because I was a little afraid. Afraid for Mama, because she didn’t have a strong constitution. She became diabetic after I was born. She always needed looking after. As a very little girl, I learned to read her blood sugar level just by looking at her face. You can laugh, but it works! It was obvious: a little too much sugar would have killed her. Papa told me early on all the food we weren’t allowed to keep at home: diabetics sometimes wake up starving and will wolf down anything they can get their hands on, only to fall into a coma! It’s awfully dangerous. We never had desserts or candy in the house, in Königsberg or in Berlin.

  A week before the move, Mama asked how I planned to say my good-byes to Königsberg. All I wanted was to visit the zoo one last time. It was right beside where we lived. So Mama and her sister, my Tante Clara, took me to the zoo one last time one Saturday morning in October. Königsberg Zoo was one of the best in Europe. I could spend hours gazing at the zebras, passing them cabbage leaves through the bars. They were right beside the giraffes. Tante Clara was sad. She only had the one sister; in fact, I think we were all she had. And we were leaving. She had been a music teacher at a school. />
  “My little Magda, come back and see me during the holidays. We’ll go to the beach in Cranz every day, if you like,” she told me at Königsberg station before kissing me for the last time. Tante Clara wasn’t married yet. She met Wolfgang later. We called him Onkel Wolfi. I think they got married about a year after we left Königsberg. It wasn’t before, I’m sure of that. I was to meet the bastard soon enough. Poor Tante Clara! She deserved better than that disgusting animal, that bigot, that satyr! Forgive me, Kapriel, I’m getting carried away. You’re an uncomplicated soul: you like your stories in chronological order. I should really tell you things as they happened. It’s easier that way. But I can’t help myself: Wolfgang Hinz was a pig!

  As I was saying, before we left for Berlin, Mama had set out her conditions. First, we were to live in Charlottenburg, nowhere else. “It’s Charlottenburg or nothing, Alfred,” she told Papa. Mama was a real Königsberg bourgeoise. My grandparents owned a shipyard and they were distinctly unimpressed when their daughter married the son of a forester from Cranz, even if he had studied literature and music.

  Mama also wanted me to go to the finest schools in Berlin, and those schools were in Charlottenburg. “I want her to learn French and English. A respectable young lady must speak French.” Mama got her every wish. I even learned French. But what made her happiest of all, I think, was the apartment Papa found in Charlottenburg. When he came to pick us up at the railway station in the car—he already had a car—Mama looked out at the noisy, filthy streets of Berlin, completely discouraged. I’m quite sure that Papa made a point of taking the Kurfürstendamm so that Mama could see our new neighborhood in all its glory. The apartment was in a big house on Schillerstraße, not too far from the new opera, the Deutsches Opernhaus, which had been the Charlottenburger Opernhaus before that. “See? You’re right beside the opera house, Waldtraut. It couldn’t be better.” We drove past the opera house so that Mama could see. She didn’t even look, she was so exhausted from the trip. Papa had bought an enormous bourgeois apartment. Eight big rooms and some furniture left behind by the previous owners. They must have left in a hurry: they hadn’t even taken the piano. It wasn’t until much later that a neighbor told me the apartment we lived in had been confiscated from a Jewish family that had had to flee Germany. Papa must have known. Mama, too, but they didn’t tell me a thing. I wouldn’t have understood anyway.

  Mama was enchanted. “Why Alfred, an apartment like this must have cost you millions!” Papa had got a very good price, he said. “It’s unbelievable,” Mama laughed. “We should have come to live here sooner!”

  It’s true that the little house in Königsberg was no match for the palace Papa had just bought. We weren’t the only newcomers to the building. There were three other apartments with new owners, one of them a colleague of Papa’s at Kraft durch Freude, a man by the name of Nowak. I was a little sad all the same. In Königsberg, we’d had a yard with a little shed, where I raised animals. I’d had a little dog, rabbits, and even three ducks one summer. In Charlottenburg, we were on the second floor: there was no way we could have rabbits, not even a cat. Mama found me a place at Sophie-Charlotte-Schule the first week. She didn’t want to send me anywhere else than a school for girls that taught foreign languages, Latin, Greek, and all the humanities. The principal gave me a funny look, I remember, because I still had my East Prussian accent. It must have been quite strong: she said something about how important it was to speak good German. And it was there on that October day in 1934 that I first encountered the idea of being in love.

  The principal escorted me to the classroom when Mama left.

  “Your group has a French class now. Do you speak French, Magdalena?”

  “Naturellement,” I replied.

  It was true. I’d taken French lessons in Königsberg, but Sophie-Charlotte-Schule catered to the daughters of Berlin’s finest families. Some spoke French fluently. I got there before the class started. It took less than two minutes for the other students to begin tormenting me. “So are you a boy or a girl then?” “Looks like a boy with long hair.” Those Berlin girls were unbearable. Yes, I looked like a boy. A real tomboy. Not ugly, but very masculine. And I wasn’t blond. Not being blond at fourteen was a calamity! Then it happened. She walked in: Mademoiselle Jacques. As she came in, the students rose as one until she told us to sit back down. It came as a complete surprise to me. Teachers in Königsberg would all bark “Heil Hitler!” as they came in, but Mademoiselle Jacques made do with a simple “Bonjour Mesdemoiselles.” Until that point, I’d had German teachers teaching me French. They would cut up their consonants into little cubes, iff you know vat I mean. Mademoiselle Jacques pronounced every word the way I’d imagined the French must speak. She was a real lady. For the longest time, I thought she was French. She was, in fact, German, descended from the Huguenots, but given her name and occupation I took her to be French.

  The word Mesdemoiselles hadn’t finished rolling off her tongue and I already knew she’d land me in all kinds of trouble. With the first consonant of Mesdemoiselles, when Mademoiselle Jacques’s lips came together to send the rest of the word off on its delightful way, angels hidden I don’t know where in the classroom fell silent. Her -elles struck me square in the face like a summer breeze coming in off the Baltic Sea. Yes, Kapriel, the charm of foreign-language teachers is as innocent as it is apocalyptic. And don’t they know it!

  Mademoiselle Jacques—I’ll remember to my dying day, and even beyond—was wearing a long grey skirt, an ivory blouse, and a navy blue jacket made of the same material as her skirt. Her thick head of hair was tied back in a bun, just above which she wore an amber barrette. When I saw it, I thought she must be from Königsberg, because when I was that age I thought all the world’s amber came from Königsberg. The tiny piece of my homeland she was wearing in her hair might as well have been a tiara.

  When she turned around to write on the board, my gaze got lost in the spiral of her chignon. I fell straight into it that day in October 1934, never to reemerge. I’m still trapped in there to this day. The other day, while you were telling me you’d fallen head over heels at the Goethe-Institut in Toronto the moment Claudia opened her mouth, the same wave of dumbfounded joy washed over me again. I couldn’t even hear what you were saying. It was as if I was fourteen again. Then Mademoiselle Jacques asked me to stand up and introduce myself to the class in French. A few hurtful girls laughed at my faltering French.

  Mademoiselle Jacques smiled. “You may sit down, Mademoiselle Berg. Welcome to Berlin. Can you tell us which part of the Reich you’re from?” She must have known already and just wanted to hear my French. And there I was, standing like Marie Antoinette before the people of France, about to lose my head.

  “My name is Magdalena Berg. I’m from East Prussia, from Königsberg. Königsberg is a German city by the Baltic Sea. The Pregel River runs through it . . .”

  Tante Clara had taught me how to say that much in French. Then I fainted. I fell hard, like a sack of potatoes. When I woke up, Mademoiselle Jacques was on the floor beside me. My head was on her lap. She was touching me, Kapriel! The angel was actually touching me! Other teachers came in to help, along with the principal.

  “Ach! It’s the little girl from Königsberg. What’s gotten into her?” I heard. They called my mother since we had a telephone at home. My father was high up in Kraft durch Freude, you see. Mama arrived with the maid to bring me home.

  “She must be exhausted!” Mama declared.

  She thought the five-hundred-kilometer train journey from Königsberg must have taken its toll on me, or maybe the noise of the city was driving me crazy, or I don’t know what else. But the beautiful Mademoiselle Jacques had quite simply knocked me on my back. But what could I say? How could I explain such a thing? It had never happened to me before, it was like no symptom I’d ever had, it was at once menacing, marvelous, and lethal. At any rate, Mama ordered complete rest for one week, which seemed like an eternity. I had to put up a fight to be allow
ed to open the French books we had at home. That’s when I became truly infected, that’s when, in the half-light of my bedroom, I began to daydream about Mademoiselle Jacques, her bun, and her—at least to my mind—oh-so-French lips.

  Mama had kept all her French schoolbooks from Königsberg. The moving crates were barely emptied and I already had my nose buried in books on French literature. In bed, I’d fill my head with subjunctives, perfect tenses, and past participle agreements. I went about it methodically, but I still allowed myself flights of fancy into books that were too advanced for me. I was like a smooth-cheeked cabin boy at the helm of a ship that was too big for him.

  “You’ll kill yourself studying,” Mama shouted. “You need your rest!”

  Mama was always shouting. Papa was always off with KdF. In the Alps, by the sea, Munich. He used to travel all around the Reich with Germans on holiday.

  For me, it was clear that happiness could only come through learning French. Mama was overjoyed by this sudden enthusiasm for foreign languages. I had been a mediocre student in Königsberg, a tad undisciplined, more interested in trips out to sea and along the Curonian Spit with Papa Alfred than mathematics and subjunctives.

  “It’s the Charlottenburg air,” Mama would say, seeing me go over my French conjugations again and again.

  Mama had played the piano since she was little. When orders dried up and her parents were forced to sell the shipyard in 1930, it fell to Papa to indulge her fondness for grand pianos and music teachers. Music costs a fortune, Kapriel. You should know.

  One night in December 1934, when Papa was off traveling and Mama was feeling unwell, I used the time to myself to plaster the apartment in pieces of paper, labeling every piece of furniture, every item, in French. There were dozens of them: la table, la chaise, la fenêtre, la fourchette, le plancher, le portrait, le téléphone, le piano . . . Everything got its own piece of paper. The following morning at breakfast, Mama thought she’d lost her mind.