“I know. I just woke up—”
“—and I have traveled here to perhaps interview you about your war experiences—”
“I have already said I won’t do any more—”
“—now that today you are to be decorated for them in a ceremony of high—”
“It’s for my nuclear power work!”
“Did you know that ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ was Hitler’s favorite song, Dr. Cohen?”
“Not Wagner?”
“No, the wolf song. Why, do you think?”
Karl blinked to clear his eyes and saw the steepled slate roofs of Paris shining in a golden sun. “Maybe he always saw himself as the wolf. His liking for his own Wolf’s Lair in Poland then caused his death.”
He knew this was a mistake, as soon as he said it.
“We Germans wish to hear more about your secret negotiations with the Abwehr, leading—”
Don’t give them an opening, he reminded himself. The receiver rattled in its cradle. “Marthe!”
“Ummm . . . ,” came from the bathroom, and her head appeared, her hand brushing her teeth. She put down the brush and said, “They will follow us everywhere today.”
“We’ll go out the back, then.”
Before going down to breakfast, he arranged his notes on a quaint round coffee table with a leather center and a stout rim of oak, standing on carved oaken legs with large griffin feet. He had worked on a speech but still had only pieces. Maybe he would have to wing it, despite his habit in technical talks of meticulous detail, well-scrubbed.
He and Marthe worked their way through narrow corridors once meant for scurrying servants, now long vanished. Down they went to a daily breakfast buffet stocked with pastries, bread, fresh fruit, and lovely light croissants. Their three daughters were already digging into the Cayré Hotel’s bounty, while he and Marthe each had a breakfast tray with the three Cs, coffee, chocolate, and croissant, le complet. The girls asked for hot cocoa in place of coffee, plus a petit pain grillé in decent French.
Beatrix was an blossoming fourteen now, their postwar child. Elisabeth a fully flowered twenty. Martine at twenty-three was now shacked up with some actor and had just arrived with a suitcase of dressy clothes. They exchanged cheery greetings and Karl thought how much easier this was, better than earlier trips, when the girls pinched, poked, and punched in the backseat of rented cars.
Now they had their newly bought, well-cushioned, and slope-snouted Citroën DS19. Paris was the end of a gyration that began in Rome, purred up to Germany for his nuclear reactor work in Karlsruhe, and now here. Early on a wise bellhop had intervened when Karl tried to cram the family in. This meant thirteen suitcases had to be jammed into the trunk. The bellhop had solved the geometric problem, and Karl had carefully drawn a 3-D diagram, so he could reconstitute the miracle later. While his girls were young, he was now fifty and needed to take notes.
Elisabeth leaped up with the vigor the young unconsciously enjoy and asked if he liked her dress, freshly bought for the occasion, a sophisticated two-piece silk knit. “Ça, c’est jolie, n’est-ce pas?”
“Formidable!” Karl sat and perked himself up with coffee. The bar and bistro within the hotel hosted breakfast too, stylish with modern furniture and a sleek all-wood bar, mounted with murmuring coffee and tea machines that lifted the burden of waiting on tables. Marthe’s parents had termed the girls jeunes filles bien élevées, which he had rendered to Beatrix as “young girls well brought up.” And indeed they were, thanks to Marthe far more than he.
Their chatter rang like birds in treetops, distant and eternally beautiful. If there was a meaning to existence, Karl felt, he was closest to it here. He recalled, as Marthe arranged their day of museums and mirth, the airplane that had delivered them to Rome in June.
On the flight over first he, then Marthe, had edged down the aisle to sit beside Elisabeth, each counseling her that if she wanted to marry her boyfriend from Guatemala or some other Central American swamp with too many vowels, most of them a, then it was perfectly all right with them. That the two parents each, without informing the other, took it as a delicate diplomatic task was soon a source of hilarity. Elisabeth responded with a laughing smile and “Nope, his daddy took his T-bird away,” a reference to some pop song whose import Karl failed to grasp until Elisabeth mentioned the Beach Boys.
Marthe had reported back from her girl-girl talk that Elisabeth took quite calmly the immense fact that she was now venturing into the landscape where she could create another human being, a prospect that to Karl seemed more frightening than, say, getting a driver’s license.
All this he felt as they finished breakfast, hustled into street garb, and turned left onto boulevard Raspail. The sisters still swam in the bottomless vortex of feminine hilarity, drawing fresh cause for mirth from every vagrant element that fell in. He realized that, striding along with the blooming girls and his wife, he was a homme à femme, a man who loved women, in all senses of the word. And the world exists for young people.
Elisabeth sidled alongside him as they neared the Louvre and said, “Father, you should write about your experiences in the war. Y’know, everyone has a book inside of them.”
He grimaced. “Maybe, and inside is exactly where I think it should remain.”
They passed a restaurant named Le Rivoli and memory came flooding back, from 1936. He and Marthe had finished dinner in exactly this spot, a good one-star Michelin restaurant. He had splurged on this third date, after two hiking outings with the International House gang. As he was paying, Marthe had asked over dessert, “Do you always wear your glasses?”
He had been distracted with the tip calculation in francs. “Yes, except in bed.”
She quickly reached over and gently took off his glasses with one deft flick. Her game, expressed not in words but easily understood across the language barrier, was that he still had to walk to his tiny apartment, which he had been too embarrassed about to show her yet. He actually managed it fairly well, though there were few streetlights, and it was dim. It had been worth it.
• • •
With the girls in tow, he and Marthe dutifully visited with her ancient aunts, in their apartment high in the Marais. They sat on musty padded Empire furniture and whispered their life histories to him amid the dusty shelves of bric-a-brac of women living in past times, in a nest with no eggs. To them marriage and death were the only markers in life, like nineteenth-century novelists. They recalled the war as a series of privations and loud noises. Then they put on a new radio station that catered to pop music from America. Flat-accented voices came on with a song titled “I Would If I Could, But I Can’t So I Won’t” without getting into burdensome, hard-to-rhyme specifics. The aunts wanted explanations of the lyrics, and the girls shot them out with startling gusto. All this told Karl that the world he knew, the pre-Elvis, pre-pill, still-puritan America, was gone.
The girls found older art fussy, so they went to the modern art must-see, Galerie Avant-Scène. “Looks like an academy for secret policemen,” Karl said, to which Marthe snickered and shot back, “More specifically, to see this in Paris, it is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”
One of the main exhibits was “demonstration art,” such as a glass of water on a glass shelf labeled An Oak Tree. Elisabeth asked, “Do the staff have to change the water from time to time because of the dust that collects on it? If so, is it then no longer the original work?”
Martine added, “Do the staff therefore have as much right to be called artists as the man who filled the glass and applied the label?”
Karl smiled. They had reared their daughters to question always, and so unlike many of the young, experimental modern art got no free pass with them. Elisabeth said wryly, “The whole point of experiments is that many fail. That’s their point, really.”
A large room devoted to “an internationally known junk sculptor” finally drove them out. For lunch they went back to Le Riv
oli and had a fine bistro meal. After, he went to the Hommes room and was gratified to find it modern, freshly scented, with a gleaming, well-plumbed toilet. When he and Marthe had come here on that “date,” which he preferred to call their courtship, it had been a filthy relic.
Back then the same space held what Parisians then termed a Turkish toilet, a tiled basin at one end, with markings for feet like parentheses. He had known those well throughout Europe in the 1930s, crowned by overhead tanks that once erupted into an impromptu shower on him. Now, instead of the bar of gray soap bolted to the wall, with a single dank towel hanging limply above a yellowing sink, there was a clean, modern porcelain set. Times had polished much, after the Big War. Parisian food was even better. And no dame pipi waited outside, expecting a tip.
Their leisurely stroll through Paris streets, in these easy last days of summer’s obliging warmth, somehow made him recall his boyhood in Brooklyn, with its clanging trolley cars and bristling little factories, ripe cornfields and fragrant green trees beside wooden apartment houses, the autumn zest of leaf fires, the solemn quiet of fall’s return, with jagged pumpkin smiles, like valentines now yellowed.
“I want to rest a bit before the festivities,” Marthe said, and they duly underwent a random walk back to the Hotel Cayré. Among the bleats of taxis there came a passing mammoth roar—the SuperMach jet taking off, thundering batlike on its way supersonically to New York. Of course, there had to be stops to check out fashionable shop windows for the girls, who marveled at the soft autumn hues of new dresses, the slick slope of impossibly priced burnt-cherry shoes. Marthe cautioned them on the height of the high heels, the suppleness of certain leathers—expertise far from Karl’s analytical realm. He inhaled the aroma of Paris, even liking the pigeons who waddled with their Chaplin-style walk, eyes beady for handouts.
As they entered the Cayré, Karl thought, Wake, eat, walk, meet, talk, see, eat, walk, dine, sleep. So go the days of our grand tour. But now comes the crescendo to a sweet summer symphony.
The girls peeled off to go back to the shops they liked, and Marthe took the tiny elevator to their room. Karl wanted to just sit with a relaxing cup of tea in the lounge, maybe look over his notes again, but as he entered, there was Moe Berg, lounging with his casual elegance, reading several newspapers.
“I thought I should pay my respects,” Moe said, rising to shake hands. “To the camera-shy physicist.”
“Ha! I’m a chemist in disguise, y’know. My God!” Karl clapped Moe on the back and hugged him in a burst of excitement. “You came all this way—?”
Moe smiled and returned the hug with one resembling being in an oversize overcoat. “Doing a bit of a job for State. Couldn’t miss this.”
“I haven’t seen you since—”
“That dinner with your wife in October 1955. You had the veal.” Moe signaled to the concierge with an arched eyebrow. “That bottle I mentioned?”
“It’s a little early for me,” Karl said. “I’ve got to give a speech—”
“It’s for the other gentlemen.”
Karl suddenly noticed two men at a far table. They were pretending to look out at the street scene, but he caught a too-casual glance by one of them—and felt a shock. “That’s . . .”
“Canaris, yes.”
“He’s getting on.” The lean man began to stand, moving slowly, the gray head watching his feet carefully.
“He’s seventy-six. Survived by his wits after we saw him. Somehow managed to elude the Gestapo in Switzerland.”
“The other guy, I recognize him from somewhere. . . .”
“That’s Rommel.”
Another shock. The men were formally dressed in old-fashioned double-breasted suits that accentuated their ramrod spines, shoulders firm in a military stance.
Rommel. Soldier turned chancellor, oddly prefiguring Eisenhower’s later arc to be president. The German surrender after the cease-fire on the western front had led quickly to the army taking over, with Rommel as head of state and von Rundstedt to head the army. Six years of war had made the generals the best-known figures in what was left of the German elite. Rommel now rose also from a leather chair, a bit more agile as the two came forward.
Generals Karl Rudolf Von Rundstedt and Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel
Karl got through the introductions by nodding and letting Moe carry the conversation. Canaris shook his hand with bony enthusiasm, his voice dry and thin. Rommel’s English was rough. His craggy jaw jutted with the pride made famous after the war, when he stood for a Germany with minimal occupation by the victors. Especially, Karl recalled vaguely, Rommel had led and inspired the hard-bitten fight against the Soviets in Poland and Hungary, saving most of eastern Europe from occupation by the Red Army. Adroit use of the V-1s, V-2s, jet airplanes, and death dust, plus the divisions withdrawn from the west, had yielded a stalemate in the bitter, deeply cold winter of early 1945.
Rommel bowed and said formally, “I must admit, Dr. Cohen, that I conspired with our present Bundestag to be here. We wish to thank you and Mr. Berg for your help in ending the war. And also for bringing the nuclear power to us in Deutschland. We wish to negotiate with your General Electric.”
This was obviously rehearsed. Moe and Karl simply accepted, nodding. Moe added, “Thus, State’s business. I thought bringing you together would slay two birds with one deft stone.”
“Which General Electric could feast upon,” Karl said. Of course, they needed today’s ceremony as a cover story for why they’re here. “You would add your prestige, Herr General Rommel, with that of Herr Admiral Canaris, to a public campaign?”
Canaris said in his whispery way, “It is for the best, nicht wahr?”
Their wine arrived, so they sat and negotiated, with polite jockeying about how to bring more nuclear power to Germany, complete with late Marshall Plan loans. Talk rolled on in mixed German and English, with French tidbits as well. Karl let it flow, taking businesslike notes in his upper mind, letting the lower surf on the language alone. The Romance languages were rich in verbs, German in nouns—indeed, so in love with them that Deutsch capitalized them all, like facts looming over emotions—while English sat efficiently in between, useless articles like der, die, das shaved away.
• • •
German had a lumbering, bull-in-china-shop feel, yet their culture gave birth to essential words that told much of what lay within: Schadenfreude, Angst, Weltschmerz—joy at the misfortune of others, anguish, sorrow at the world—words revealing the yawning abyss in their souls? But then there was a fine word that sounded like what it meant, Gemütlichkeit.
Still, this culture had, in the summer of 1945, summoned the strength to suggest that they and the British collaborate in forming Israel, with Marshall Plan largesse. Rommel had done that, with Churchill buying in. Truman sent some Jewish military experts, and the Arabs folded.
Now a Jewish state sprawled from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, King Solomon’s borders, with Palestine beyond to the east. Israel sported three nuclear reactors with matching desalination fountains, too, babbling brooks coursing through emerald farms bigger than its glinting, murmuring cities.
Karl registered that Canaris was presenting a book to him, and accepted with a murmur, reading its title: Berichte aus der Parallelwelt. “Reports from the parallel world?” The jacket showed a burning map of Germany. He put it gingerly on the table between them.
Canaris smiled, eyes animated, the transparent joy of a published author. “I have considered our fate, had we not met with you two gentlemen.”
“An hour later,” Moe said, “and we’d have escaped.”
“Into a worse world,” Rommel added with a grim scowl.
Canaris spat out quickly, “We could not bring in the others of our Junker culture—Halder, von Rundstedt, von Manstein, Guderian, von Kluge—if you did not take our message, and caught Schicklgruber in his cave.”
Karl recalled that this had been Hitler’s earlier name, from a father who was a bastard.
Canaris had lifted his voice in shrill derision as he pronounced it.
Rommel leaned forward with a frown. “We did not expect so quick a response, since Churchill had rejected the 1943 Canaris overture”—a nod to the older man—“and yet the Allies ceased fire within days. Wunderbar.”
Moe stretched his legs, and eyes turned to him. “That’s still a secret. An old one, though. I can say a bit, since I was sent on a mission to France—sorry, Karl, didn’t tell you—to confirm the messages sent to MI5. A Soviet agent, Kim Philby, gave up the whole Soviet network that had been misleading Churchill in many ways. That was the last straw. The Soviets had betrayed the alliance, blocking vital information, even negotiations. They were determined to bull their way into Europe. Churchill saw that we could avoid a lot of deaths if you would stand down.”
Canaris blinked. “You know this . . . how?”
Moe smiled, a slow, steady grin, remembering. “From our Office of Special Services. Quietly. We didn’t want the Soviets to see we’d cracked their ring, and their codes.”
“Which we got from you—and which let us tap into the Soviet communications. Ah, yes.” Rommel grinned too. “I recall when we turned them back at Warsaw, at Budapest, and far from Prague. They were outraged! Tens of millions have not had to endure Soviet occupation.”
Canaris tapped his book. “Ending the European war in January 1945 saved enormous numbers of soldiers on the eastern front. More millions who would have died in those Nazi death camps.”
Karl and Moe glanced at each other, stayed silent. A gravitas hovered in the air, the background Paris sound seeming to fall away, the colors outside fading, in favor of the mists of memory.
Rommel said, “In 1939 we did not foresee the death trains, gas chambers, and crematoria. The National Socialists spoke of such, but we did not believe it would be, that people could . . .” His voice drained away and his face took on a gray, forlorn cast. “Was muss sein, muss sein.”
Karl knew this meant “What must be, must be” and saw these men, in their twilight, still struggling to make sense of their moment in the crucible of history, while ostensibly here to further nuclear development—nuclear, the new. But really paying tribute to their shared past, on the anvil of the war.
The Berlin Project Page 40
