“Why should I divulge what is meaningless?” he said. “A banal dossier of ‘this was my grandfather, I was steered into this or that profession.’ My existence is free of those tedious things.”
“I bet the opposite is true,” she said. “I bet you live in a prison of your ‘tedious’ past.”
“It isn’t a prison,” he said. “You’ll see.” And then he fell quiet, as if her accusation had sent him drifting into contemplation.
If only it were tedious, he thought at her, but didn’t say out loud. If only. In fact, it’s sordid and remarkable to have been an incidental SS. With no war, no army, no country. Only floating memories of medals and Maxim’s and going to fight the Bolsheviks, thinking fascism was better than Stalin and that I was fighting for heritage and class, and then knowing that I wasn’t. That it had nothing to do with politics or ideals. Of course, there were some with ideals. Not me. But I had conviction — you might even call it rare — the conviction to enlist at the Hotel Majestic on a stifling hot August day in 1944, when the war was already lost. Why I enlisted. I’m still not sure, but a reason was beside the point: It was a pure sacrifice, empty of reasons, a bigger, more grand self-erasure. On my way to enlist, I saw people shuttling into the Velodrome. I won’t deny that I saw them, being led inside. I was a helmeted dreamer who waited in a German uniform while Pétain dozed in his chambers. Pétain in his kepi with the scrambled eggs braid, who refused to see us, the few who were ready to keep going, the only people, correction, the only person with the conviction to fight to lose, to test nothing but extremes. They all caved and Pétain slept in his kepi with the scrambled eggs braid. I’m a man who had to go it alone, fight with conviction and for nothing, with men who didn’t speak my language. The only one who didn’t cave.
Fair enough, he thought. She’s no more mysterious than I am to myself. And so here I am, in a burlesque club below the Tropic of Cancer, in this damp city where dreams are marbled with nothingness.
It was time for her show.
The blue lights flipped on. Smoky haze drifted above the tables.
“Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”