Five days after Dalia left Germany for good I received a visitor. A little to my surprise it was State Secretary Gutterer, from the Ministry of Truth. He’d put on a little more weight since the last time I’d seen him but he was just as supercilious as ever; all the same I was pleased to see him. I’d have been pleased to see anyone after spending almost a week by myself. Even a man wearing a black top hat.
“You’re very fortunate you’re not going to stay in here for a lot longer,” he said. “It’s lucky for you you’ve got some friends with influence.”
I nodded. “That sounds promising.”
“As soon as it can be arranged, you’re leaving Berlin,” he said. “You can spend a couple of weeks on Rügen Island with your wife and then you’re to join army intelligence on the Panther-Wotan line. It’s an insignificant section of the defensive line that runs between Lake Peipus and the Baltic Sea on our Eastern Front. You’ll be a lieutenant in the 132nd Infantry Division, part of Army Group North, where a man of your negligible talents can be properly appreciated. Right now, I believe it’s uncomfortably hot there. Lots of mosquitoes. But you won’t be surprised to learn that it gets very cold in winter. Which is only a couple of months away. And of course let’s not forget the Russians are coming. They should keep you occupied for as long as you manage to stay alive.”
I nodded. “Fresh air, sounds good,” I said. “And Rügen Island with my wife. That will be nice. Thank you. She’ll like that.”
Gutterer paused. “What? No jokes, Lieutenant Gunther?”
“No, not this time.”
“I’m disappointed in you. No, really.”
“Lately — I’m not quite sure why — I’ve lost my sense of humor, Herr State Secretary. I suppose it weighs a bit heavily on me, being in the Linden Hotel, of course. This isn’t a place for mirth. That and the fact that I’ve just come down to earth with a loud bump and realized that I am no longer a god. The fact is, I’ve suddenly stopped feeling as if I were painted with gold and lived on Mount Olympus.”
“I could have told you that, Gunther.”
“For a short while she made me feel that way. I walked as tall as the tallest man, breathed the purest air, and took an absurd delight in myself. I even managed to face myself in the shaving mirror. I thought, if she can look at me with pleasure, then perhaps I can, too. But now I shall have to get used to being ordinary again. I am, in short, exactly like you, Gutterer: ignoble, inhuman, small-minded, sterile, ugly, with a mind like a paper knife.”
“You’re making no sense at all, you know that, don’t you?”
“I daresay that a man with your great wordsmith’s skills could have written that speech better for me, Herr State Secretary. But you’ll forgive me if I say you couldn’t ever have felt any of those things. Not in a thousand years. You were never a Teutonic knight of the Holy Roman Empire. You’ve never fought and defeated a troll or a dragon. You’ve never sacrificed yourself for a noble cause. You’ve never pledged a woman loyalty on your sword. Which is really what’s important in life.”
Gutterer sneered.
“Let me tell you something,” he said. “And you can take this from the Ministry of Truth. She’s going to forget all about you, Gunther. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but as time goes by, I can absolutely guarantee it. You’ll certainly never hear from her again. My ministry is going to make absolutely sure of that. Any letters sent to or received from her house in Switzerland won’t ever arrive. Telegrams will be ignored. Nothing. You mark my words, by the time Christmas comes she won’t even remember your name. You’ll just be a sentimental little adventure she had one summer when she played Lili Marlene to your soon-to-be-dead soldier. A footnote in the life of a minor film actress of insignificant talent. Think about that when you’re sitting in a cold foxhole on the Dnieper River and waiting for an ignominious death. Think about her, wrapped in a fox fur, and in some other man’s arms, her husband, perhaps, or some other fool like you who thinks he’s more than just her favorite toy.”
Gutterer got up to leave.
“Oh, I nearly forgot something important.” He tossed an official-looking envelope onto the table in front of us and smiled unpleasantly. “Those are two tickets to the cinema for you. A last gift from Dr. Goebbels. The Saint That Never Was starring Dalia Dresner is playing at the Kammerlichtspiele in the Café Vaterland. The minister thought that you might like them so you can see her and know that you’re never going to see her again.”
“Kind of him. But that makes two of us, doesn’t it?”
As Gutterer walked out of my cell, I remembered the graffiti on my cell and for no reason I can think of, I said it out loud.
“Long live our sacred Germany.”
I don’t expect he understood what it meant. In fact, I’m fairly certain of it.
Epilogue
I’m not sure the ending of my story would ever have satisfied a proper writer like Paul Meyer-Schwertenbach. There was no restoration of moral order — at least none that I could see; such a thing seemed impossible while the Nazis remained in power. Not to mention the fact that the detective had helped the murderer to escape. Twice. This would have been bad enough, but in my story the cop had been so slow on the uptake he’d needed the help of the killer to understand what had happened in front of his own eyes. And I’d nearly forgotten the fact that the detective himself had killed two people. Three, if you count death by farmer’s bull. That wasn’t good, either. Detectives are supposed to solve murders, not commit them. All in all I thought it was a pretty poor excuse for a detective story. In fact, the only murder that was properly solved — that of Dr. Heckholz, and even that was little more than a good guess — was promptly ignored. Perhaps that was why only the detective himself was punished. At least that’s what it felt like. I don’t know how else to describe it when you meet a girl, fall for her in a big way, and never get to see her again, except on the cinema screen, which, as I think I said before, is itself a very subtle kind of punishment. It’s a bit like what happened to that demigod Tantalus, for whom food and water were placed forever and tantalizingly out of reach.
These days I read a lot. In the winter there’s not much else to do on the Côte d’Azur. The Greek and the German philosophers — I love that crap. I can’t see the point of reading a book by someone who’s dumber than you are, which accounts for most modern fiction, in my humble opinion. Plato talks about something called anamnesis, which is when something long forgotten comes to the surface of a man’s consciousness. Now, I’ll admit that just sounds like a fancy word for remembering something, but actually it’s more than that because, with remembering, it’s not necessary to have forgotten anything, which makes for a subtle distinction. That’s what cinema does. It brings long-forgotten things to the surface. When you’re least expecting it, too — which is how you come to walk out of a pretty bad film in La Ciotat with tears streaming down your face. Goebbels had been a very subtle torturer when he’d had Gutterer hand me those cinema tickets at the Linden Hotel in Potsdam. Ever since then I’d avoided seeing Dalia’s movies; the pain had been too much. But after more than a decade I thought I was over that and it came as a bit of a shock to discover that I could still cry like a baby when I saw her up on the screen. Fortunately, it was a matinee and there was no one else to see me. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with anyone crying in a movie. If a movie can’t make you cry, then nothing can. When I saw Dumbo, I thought I’d never stop crying.
I walked out of the Eden and along the seafront to a bar I often went to in the summer after finishing my work at the Miramar Hotel. But right now it was winter and the hotel was closing and I was wondering how I was going to survive until spring. It was only the serious yachtsmen who came to La Ciotat in November, although some of the bars stayed open all year around to get their trade. It could be worth it, too. If you can afford a yacht, you can afford a lot. While I drank my coffee and schnapps I borrowed the bar owner’s binoculars and watched a very serious-looking yacht as it docked. If you have a peculiar sense of humor like mine you can get a lot of laughs watching some fellow scrape his very expensive toy and then bawl someone out for it, usually his wife. But with this one, they knew what they were doing. It was a wooden-hulled, schooner-rigged boat about thirty-five meters long and maybe a hundred or more tons with a French flag on the stern. The owner and his crew came ashore and walked straight by my table in a haze of cigarettes, expensive perfumes, and a variety of accents.