The Losing Role

by Steve Anderson

  Mutti and Vati and his little brother Harry got him on a train straight to New Hampshire. Some who came over at that age were able to shake much of their accent. Young Harry already sounded like an Ami in English. Not Max, and missing high school didn’t help. He gave baking a shot in Manchester but he knew he was not meant to be a baker. He and his father fought about it. How could Max know what he wanted? His Vati told him he was only a kid, and he was running from a good solid life. He took more acting, singing and dancing classes by night and tried out for small roles in local theater productions. But by day it was early hours and tough dough and the other bakers were immigrants too and spoke only German to him. To top it off, Manchester was a burg and a burg was a burg. His only way out was New York City.

  The year was 1934. Early spring. Max and his father had one fight too many. He hugged his crying mother and young Harry and was out the door. Max spent his first days just walking the streets. This wasn’t Manchester and it sure wasn’t old Deutschland. He marveled at the massive city blocks, the vast sidewalks, the giant billboards for gum and tires and hair tonic. Every sight was a superlative. So many carefree and laughing people he saw! He must have appeared the astounded immigrant, but not for long—soon he would throw himself into their struggle, the daily round of punch and jab and charm. This city was a country of its own and just made for him. America had become the cradle of all that was modern, and what could be more modern than American show biz? Dreams were life here. The musicals promised it. Hadn’t he told everyone on the ship it was so?

  Many German writers and actors, producers, and publishers were choosing America. Most were Jewish and had little choice, of course. Still, if they could do it, why couldn’t he?

  Six months in.

  Certain realities had set in. The worst thing about Manhattan was the subtropical heat. There was little escape from it. People sweated and fanned each other and walked with long slow steps, conserving energy. And yet they kept going. Bustling. The hustling. Max tried the English-speaking theaters, but he had little luck. All the émigrés had tried. How many accents did Broadway need? No matter what he tried, he was an émigré. He was neither Jew nor Communist yet all Americans assumed he was both. And why wouldn’t they? He’d arrived on a growing wave of persecuted émigrés. Like zombies they trundled about Manhattan with their tired stunned pale faces and rumpled clothes.

  All the while, Americans didn’t let them forget that World War I and the Great Depression were far from over. They yelled at Max on the street:

  “All you Yids, nabbing all the good jobs.”

  “Go back to Heini-Land, Hitler lover.”

  He took French lessons. Maybe he could pass himself off as French? It only got him more laughs, more jabs.

  His money was running out. He told himself he’d done the right thing. Things could be worse. At least most émigrés had their shabby rooms and menial jobs while many of the American-born artists had to sleep on park benches. That was the downside of the shimmering, optimistic, industrial mindset. You’re on your own, Jack, so deal with it.

  A year gone.

  Max couldn’t afford Broadway shows. He almost never made it into the grand theaters of the Great White Way, and yet he made sure to stroll the theater district as many nights as he could, taking it all in. Who were these people in their fur overcoats and silken hats? Of course they were laughing. What he hated most was waking from an afternoon nap, dazed, and then realizing, in a dark slam of truth, where he was. The cheap cafeterias he frequented doubled as drug stores, so Max had to eat his greasy egg sandwich next to displays of ointments, bandages, elixirs. And he began to resent the little differences all over, just as he had when he came over in ’31. He started seeking out more Germans, for the comfort. In the émigré coffeehouses they traded complaints. Here the doors have knobs instead of handles. How can you open the door with your hands full? Not only that, the doors opened the “wrong” way, that is, out of the building rather than into it. And peanut butter? Disgusting. What kind of a people could love that brown goo? Then there were the women. They were beautiful, to be sure, but why were they all so prim? It seemed absurd to Max that here, in modern America, it wasn’t considered polite to start a conversation with an attractive woman on the bus or subway. What could be more modern and gentlemanly? Every time he tried it he got a cold stare or a slap.

  One early evening in Greenwich Village, Max was waiting for a bus outside Haus des Kuckuck, a cheerless new cabaret full of émigrés and outcasts hoping to recreate Weimar Berlin. What a hopeless endeavor. Beer was served in tin pitchers. The political jokes were ten years old. A young and nubile dancer from Bohemia was giving it her best, but the horrible lighting refused to cooperate. Outside, the streets had quieted for that calm time between work and play. Max was alone out on the sidewalk. He’d leaned against the bus stop pole as American men did but the pole bit into his ribs. So there he stood, his feet together as if waiting in an imaginary line, when a young woman—a “gal”—strolled up and stood next to him.

  She was smiling. She clicked her heels together. Was she mocking his stance? Max could play along. Slowly, he turned his head and let his eyes move up her fine leg—a “gam,” they called it, and onward and upward, all along her splendid curves until he found her face. She had dimples and thick red lips and blondish curls that refused to stay under her hat. Lovely flapping eyelashes shrouded her eyes. He said, “Beg your pardon, Miss, can you tell me what bus you’re riding? I should very much like to join you.”

  She turned to him. He added a tip of his hat. Her eyes were sky blue with little silver flecks. Wunderschön. “Well, Fritzy, aren’t you the fresh one?” she said.

  “Fresh?”—like this it meant “frech.” Max shrugged. “Perhaps. One must not behave like a monk.”

  “Oh, so it’s frisky Fritzy, is it?”

  “Actually it is Max—Max Kaspar. Although I do like your name for me.”

  “Good thing.” She held out a hand gloved in red and said, “How do?”

  Max shook her hand, once tenderly, and gave a little bow from his waist.

  “So, Max Kaspar—what did you think of the stripper?”

  “Bitte? What?”

  She laughed. “The stripteaser—the dancer, in the Kuckuck. Silly. If that wasn’t you I saw in there I’ll eat my hat.”

  Max smiled. “Please, you wouldn’t want to eat such a pretty hat.” He removed his bowler and offered it to her. She laughed again. Max flipped his hat back on. “I was in there, yes,” he began, “but I’ve decided I must quit living that life.”

  “Haven’t we all?” She sighed. “I, for one, felt sorry for that dancer. No one can afford to live it up in a joint like that. It’s too depressing.”

  “The owner’s from Cologne,” Max said, as if this was an excuse.

  A bus was coming, turning into their street two blocks down.

  “Sure, and don’t I know it? Guy doesn’t even know you need a liquor license. Wanna stay open? Just wait till the bulls come in for the take. Get me?”

  “Bulls?”

  “The coppers.”

  “Ah, as in ‘Bullen.’” Max wagged a finger. “How do you know all this?”

  She opened her purse and held it open for Max. “See a check in there? I was in to pick up my first check. Supposed to be their cigarette girl—ha! Now I got no check, and I need no check like I need a hole in my head.” She shook her head. “What’s a gal gonna do? Joint’s going under any day now. So I quit, see.”

  “And the pig let you? What a fool.”

  She tilted her head at him, and her curls bounced and seemed to unravel down to her chin. “Ah, now ain’t that sweet?”

  Did she mean it? Max hoped. Americans spoke with so much sarcasm, so much irony. He shrugged, smiling. “Ach, what can one say?”

  The bus coming was his, he saw.

  “Anyway, a gal’s gotta eat,” she added.

  The bus kept coming and passed Max by, so full that men stood in the door
way. He waved his hat and cussed in German and English. “Goddamnit all to heck! Heck, heck you!”

  Her head had pulled back. She chuckled. “Hey, you got to relax.”

  “You’re right. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to miss my bus,” he said. He offered her a cigarette, one of his last two. She took it and he lit it.

  “Name’s Lucy,” she said and walked off down the street, rocking her hips.

  Max watched her. He could watch this a long time. He would have given his last ten dollars to watch her cross the next intersection.

  She stopped and turned to him. “That was my bus too. You coming or not?”

  Lucy Cage was one of the few Americans who spoke to Max while looking him straight in the eye. The others were always moving too fast, looking for the next street corner, or thinking of the next three things to say.

  For Lucy, Max tried harder. He avoided the dark coffee houses full of his melancholy émigré friends. For lunch, he gave the automats a go. He strolled into one on Eighth Avenue and gazed at the bright chromium and Bakelite—a wall of clear plastic doors. “How does it work?” he asked a passing attendant.

  “See the little doors? Reach in one, grab yourself a sandwich, piece a pie, anything you want we got it.”

  “Pie?” For lunch—Max never understood it. There was a time and place for treats.

  “Sure, an’ add a slice of cheese if you want. Any door you like.”

  Max got a piece of blueberry pie. It put a bounce in his step, but an hour and a half later he was hungry again and he needed a nap. He complained to Lucy, but she only shrugged. “A guy’s gotta adapt,” she said.

  Max kept trying. He changed his stage name to Maximilian von Kaspar. He thought this would help. That’s what you do in America, keep changing the game—one of the more successful émigrés had told him this. It helped little. His agent could only get him parts playing silly continentals in off-off Broadway shows.

  “If I wanted that, I might have stayed home,” Max complained.

  “But that’s what you are,” his agent shot back. “The continental. Look at the name you gave yourself, for God’s sake. So work with it. Work with me.”

  That agent lasted another month. The next one could only get Max roles in B-Movies playing insipid Prussians wearing monocles or crude Nazis with hate burning in their eyes. All they saw was a Hun. A Heini. The worst part was, they required that Max move to Hollywood—half a world away. Hollywood? One émigré called it that “candy-coated hell.” Many Germans who tried it fled back to Manhattan broken, hobbling, alcoholic. To them, and to Max, America was New York City. The rest was just a colony. Yet he too was somewhat of a colonial, forgotten in Germany and unknown to America.

  Nine

  December 15, 1944. Night had fallen around Münstereifel, a forest-bound town near the intersection of Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Deep within the forest, Max, Felix and Zoock sat perched on crates next to their American jeep, smoking and shivering as they waited for the attack launch—set for 5:15 in the morning.

  If only Max could have known that leaving America would someday lead to this. Their crates and jeep sat on a vast clearing of cold mud. Above them, the branches hung so densely intertwined Max couldn’t make out the stars in the sky. It was a dim catacomb of pine and birch. The forest dripped and trickled. The constant pit-pat pounded in Max’s head. He closed his eyes and imagined he was sleeping in a grand high bed, with a feather bag a foot thick, and he was wearing silk pajamas. A young warm maiden cuddling up to him . . . His eyes popped open. If only it were true. These woods housed an armed camp. It reeked of freshly churned mud, acrid like a salt, and the bitter fumes of blackened exhausts. Then there was the constant racket of guns being cleaned, of wrenches clanging, of boots sloshing mud. Soldiers coughed and sputtered nervous laughs. Engines roared alive, then cut out just when Max got used to their drone.

  He’d even stuffed paper in his ears. It did no good. He’d sleep sitting up if he could. But who could sleep? So much had happened that day. At the Münstereifel train station Special Unit Pielau was split into teams and attached to the various regular units that would escort them into battle—and cover their infiltration behind American lines. Max, Zoock, Felix and their jeep ended up here in this clearing with the First SS Panzer Corps. They were one small cog in a monstrous wheel. It seemed the whole German army had ended up in this remote border region of Northwest Germany. The latest rumors told that tent cities and masses of tanks, half-tracks, and artillery had filled every forest. Even Max’s most unmilitary mind could grasp what was about to go down. For months the Allies had been racing toward Germany. They controlled the air. They had the troops and unending supplies. Then the weather turned worse for the winter. The thick fog, clouds, and snow would make fighting a grind and air superiority moot. For American and British commanders, it was the perfect time to let supplies catch up and the fighting men rest. Their armies were hunkering down in Belgium, Luxembourg, and pockets of Northwest Germany. Besides, they need not hurry. Germany was practically a corpse, and corpses weren’t going anywhere. The Allies could afford to be complacent in victory. So Hitler and his band of generals cooked up a wild plan. Beyond the Münstereifel woods loomed Belgium’s mighty Ardennes Forest, through which German armies had marched into France both in 1914 and in 1940. France had been taken by surprise, and the Allies had buckled. So, why not once more into that breach? It would have to be the West’s largest offensive since 1940—a massive, surprise drive through Belgium and on to the coast of France seizing Allied posts, depots and bridges along the way. As in 1940 they’d push the Allies to the English Channel, which left Paris open to them on the left flank. The window for opportunity had to be small, Max also knew. The victories of 1914 and 1940 required good weather. With its narrow muddy roads, rushing rocky streams, and tight confining ravines, the Ardennes in winter would be a cramped route at best. Hitler’s band of lackey goons probably had less than a month to get it right. Still, as all good Germans knew, Hitler and his lackey goons always got things right on the money.

  After midnight now. December 16. Less than five hours until the attack. Felix passed Max his GI canteen. He’d filled it with something called Jägermeister, a sweet and sticky herbal liquor that, Felix said, had kept noble German hunters warm for centuries. Another Felix fib. Even Max knew that the stuff had only been around since about 1935.

  “Better drink that up,” Felix said. “Not too many GIs around with herbal liquor in their canteens.”

  Max wiped the opening with his sleeve and took a tidy sip. “Thanks, Joe,” he said, practicing his best American. “Thanks lot.”

  They still sat on their crates, surrounded by the muck. Felix had calmed down a great deal. When they’d first showed up in this forest with their American jeep and uniforms, the regular soldiers of the First SS Panzer Corps only stared and shook their heads. What these fake Amis were up to with their tricks and subterfuges they didn’t want to know—and Max, for his part, didn’t want to be asked. SS Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny had called their mission Operation Greif. Fitting name, Max thought. A Greif, or Griffon, was a mythical monster with the body of a lion, the head and wings of an eagle, and a back covered with feathers. In other words, a sideshow freak. Which is exactly what they were. Felix, on the other hand, had probably expected an ovation. He had glared at the soldiers and refused to juggle anything.

  Now it was Max who’d fallen into a grim mood. His own private little production was looking like a total rewrite. He had planned to make contact with the Americans carefully, correctly, and without malice. Anonymity and self-reliance were the keys to a stellar performance. Talk about a hopeless run. At first Skorzeny had kept him in the uniform of the feared and hated SS—and underneath his American garb at that. Nevertheless, he was hoping to be made a lowly GI corporal or private. When they arrived in Münstereifel Captain Rattner had issued him the uniform of a US lieutenant. Everywhere Max turned his plan was coming unhitched. He had intende
d to sneak off into the woods and go it alone once the mission was underway. Yet they were to be crammed into a jeep, riding at the spearhead of a massive surprise assault that would panic and enrage the Americans. And to top it off? His jeep team included Felix and Zoock. How was he to shake his good Kameraden without betraying them?

  As midnight neared, most of the regular soldiers left for a nearby barn where there was a fire and hot soup. Their songs and laughter echoed through the trees.

  “They can go to hell,” Felix said in American. “We’re the elite fighters, not them.”

  “Goddamn correct,” Max said, giving it his best. The linguists in Grafenwöhr had learned that front-line GIs swore incessantly so they’d encouraged the jeep teams to curse in American, the cruder the better. They also produced updated scripts. Zoock the sailor was a great help here. One went like this:

  Situation: You face an American sentry.

  American sentry: WHO GOES THERE?

  You say: JUST ME, JOE. WHO THE FUCK ELSE?

  Or you say: JUST ME, JOE. WHAT THE FUCK?

  If the sentry is not satisfied, do not try to understand his demands, as this will only give you away. Respond in one of four following ways:

  1.) FUCK IT. I’M LEAVIN.

  2.) GO FUCK YOURSELF. OUTTA MY WAY.

  3.) LOOK WHAT WE GOT HERE—A REAL FUCKIN EGGHEAD

  4.) FUCKIN FDR—WHO YOU THINK?

  As Max and Felix drank and smoked on their crates Zoock was over fussing with their jeep, arranging the gear just so as if this steel and olive drab equivalent of a donkey were his sailing ship. Their donkey was definitely laden. Tucked under the front seat was a counterfeit wad of five hundred US dollars and another of British pounds. American, German and British guns, explosives, and grenades filled the storage spaces. They had exquisitely forged papers, a topnotch American field radio, and Zippo cigarette lighters that each hid a vial of swift-acting poison. The jeep bore the insignia of the 5th US Armored Division. Its hood had a white X on the corner—so that German soldiers in the know could recognize them as German agents. Zoock was to be their driver. It was good news, except for one snag—the sailor had been acting odd ever since the POW camp fiasco.