Clouds Over Paris, page 10
The Ogou [i.e. Hautgoût?] corner, noisy as a fish shop. Sofas with a wide view. The tubby little man with a rigid artificial hand, in a glove. With no real back to his head, and no neck, the face poorly set and stitched together somewhere. Keen on meeting everyone, shaking everybody’s hand, constantly popping up behind the table. A tall thin corporal with steel-rimmed spectacles, with likewise no back to his head, but furnished with angular jug ears; an alarming lack of chin, which seems to have been swallowed, only to consolidate with his Adam’s apple. His face is pale and measly; his neighbour’s, in contrast, well nourished and ruddy. But he is constantly prying around the room with his overly bright eyes. Les requins.
Journalists, press attachés, propaganda squadron, Rosenberg Taskforce||: nothing but pretty little things, us! Only a couple of minor flaws: the tie a little too light, the hair too thin, a neck too full, an ear overworked. Rather too many nervous hand gestures: two ring-covered fingers up by the temples, pushing the skin into a couple of folds; a forefinger and thumb picking something off a chin, out of the dimple. They’ve seen ugliness, of course. Captured during the German invasion of Brussels, sent off to France in sealed trains, standing up for days on end with nothing to drink and given a miserable thrashing by the Sûreté. Things are bearable now, certainly. But for how long? S. has been detailed to Warsaw and R., who had that bother over the figures, was called up overnight.
They help themselves while filing to [blank] Then they run their hand through their scented hair, shoot their cuffs. A quick, searching glance around the room: a slight bow and a click of heels, a raised arm, and you’re given a table in some far-flung corner. Conversations with the waiter are long and low. Not very far with the French yet, but that doesn’t really matter. A confident manner and knowing your way around a menu are much more important. “Can I offer you a Corton?… Or perhaps a Chablis today?… Is the rôti passable?… It’s now official: apparently Roosevelt is Jewish… Did you read about that English aircraft carrier? Amazing… Wasn’t that a great place yesterday? Just Luftwaffe and French there… Nice birds… That nineteen-year-old Creole girl… wonderful hip action… Do you know Baudelaire?… Have you seen Andrée, no, what’s she called, in Baty’s play?… Very interesting, but the French can’t do Shakespeare. Too precious… didn’t work… I need a couple of dates from you for the diary…”
The sequestered ministry
The railings: a row of gold-tipped lances, head-height on a plinth wall. Lilac bushes beyond. The front room of the little one-storey lodge building serves as the guardroom and accommodates a half-dozen young airmen. A great fire crackles in the grate, accompanied by reflections, from antique gold and the legs of gleaming boots. A radio pours from the windowsill, but there is a piano going, too: the pianist, hollow back, belt and webbing, attempting to reconstruct a popular song he heard yesterday in Montmartre. Beside him a messmate, lost in reverie, his milk-white cheek propped in his hand, occasionally hitting one of the lower notes with the stem of his pipe; in answer, a heart-rending yawn from the back room. Everything is swathed in blue smoke. The furnishings, some badly damaged, consist of a variety of sumptuous armchairs and couches, which cannot conceal their origins in the ministry salons. On the mantelpiece, a magnificent pendule in a case made of pink marble or porphyry with ormolu fittings. Beside it: army helmets, tinned meat. Engloûti. In the depths of one of these armchairs, a man with a knitted brow reads a “True Stories” magazine. Initially, he does not react to the corporal’s shout, as if the frequency were simply not on his radar. The corporal is filling in the guard book. Swaying next to him, one of the charwomen from the Palais, large, voluptuous, middle-aged; she coughs into her thin fur stole: “On étouffe avec cette fumée” and attempts, in vain, to sell him a bar of cooking chocolate. When she taps on his shoulder, he treats her to a friendly poke in the stomach: “Will you sod off… bitch.” – After a general stuck his oar in, some of the fauteuils are retired and a gun rack constructed. – Outside stands a wheelbarrow full of chopped-up, freshly sawn branches, as thick as your arm; the ministry garden is like a park. In the summer, a couple of the ostentatious seating options are pushed outside. Right next to the wall there is an area, hidden from the street: the perfect spot for sitting in the sun. Squashed down across the chair, legs hooked over the armrests, arms folded behind one’s head. Comfortable it is not, but one should not be fazed by opulent furniture. The tight blue knees, the creases still just discernible, higher than one’s head and splayed apart, distant peaks in the hot shimmering air. A cloud of sparrows blustering in the faded lilac bushes – the golden lances aquiver and the gravel soon baked hard in the heat…
Half a seal still clings to the door of the long Archive wing. Midday and the stairwell still plunged in darkness. On the third floor, one of the initial rooms serves as the control room for the secret military police, the GFP. A pervading smell of Harz Mountain cheese and Fougère royale. The men, in slippers and cardigans, polish off slices of bread and butter. Parent unit: Fürth. A bright sea-green glow from the fireplace – the colour used to cover the Archive’s tens of thousands of file boxes. On the mantelpiece, a row of plaster Columbines, in unsparingly short skirts, a collection of bronzes: charioteers, draped with sausage skins. A wonderful scene: Rafaelli? Hoarfrost, winter sun along the Quai des Tournelles, looking through the shimmering frosty air onto the chancel of Notre-Dame. Blue, purple, yellow-white. – The adjoining rooms are divided up into individual bedrooms, as can be seen from the nameplates: Rifleman Weigel, Private, Colonel. Sofas, on which the heads of department used to take their afternoon naps, heavy silk brocade curtains for blankets. Lieutenant S. set up camp using some file boxes on Siam, refusing to empty them; he enjoys reading the files himself, and has specific instructions from the SS office. One of his men assisted him in overcoming any language difficulties, an extraordinarily friendly and obliging seminarian who can play the piano and type, and speaks good French. Reputedly from Alsace. It’s not much of a life with the Bavarians. The loo broken, the lift stuck: there’s always something to keep him busy. The actual head of the detachment, a captain and quite an old campaigner (“faithful to the end, but what a temper…” (Z[itsche].)), is currently in a military hospital in Amiens. One night, speeding at 100 kilometres per hour, straight into a tree; driver dead on impact. Lieutenant S. took part in defeating the Pilsudski Guard and flushing them out of the trees like squirrels with his pistol, but generally he gets on splendidly with everybody. Except the guards next door, in the Reichsmarschall Palais… they drive him crazy. Those stupid oafs with their sub-machine guns – he now lets his men keep watch with hand grenades in their belts. He has had one corridor, which connects the Palais and the Archive buildings, simply bricked up; someone has written in pencil on the nice white plaster: This way to the Reichsmarschall. The door which leads out into the garden on the ground floor has been boarded up with heavy wooden planks.
Hundreds of rooms line the long corridors. Every door smashed open, every cupboard, every writing desk broken into. The drawers hang pathetically out of the grandiose bureaux d’acajou. Streams of letters have poured onto the floor; draughts leaf through photograph albums. The dust is already a quarter of an inch thick. The result is like Pompeii: all the calendars say 14/6/40. Newspapers consumed by the sun: des formations blindées ennemies ont réussi à s’infiltrer… Les combats continuent sur tout le front… Maps of the Aisne sector, the Weygand Line. In the bare, tube-like room belonging to the huissier, who was just finishing off the post (the valise for Madrid; the courier was due to leave that evening), there is a kettle, a tin of sardines. Top hats, little ladies’ umbrellas lie strewn across the tables, a powder puff. A tartan travelling rug with straps… L’exode… A novel in every drawer. At certain windows, the awning has slipped down, so that the room is bathed in a yellowy-brown half-light. Rooms in which only the dreary brown of pine cupboards, the green of lampshades and document folders, prevail. The rooms for heads of departments equipped with the best period furniture or gleaming with ultramodern glass and nickel steel. The walls of one reception room are completely covered in pigskin leather, edged with thin strips of glass-topped cherry wood, a golden-brown velvet carpet. Then one day the leather – in sections of up to two square metres – had been neatly cut out, revealing rough timberwork beneath. The offending implement, a little ministerial penknife, still lies on the glazed windowsill. – On some desks, whole banks of telephones, of all different vintages, in most cases the mouthpiece and receiver separate. A map of Norway with the landing zones hatched in blue. Europe with the German–Russian demarcation line added very much by hand. Poincaré’s bumpy head staring down at you, Barthou’s barbe carrée. The walls of the office of the sous-directeur d’Afrique are hung with dancers from Marrakesh, the slender backs of black women gripping their shoulders – large, darkened, reddish-brown photographs. A group of holy men. The four gentlemen concerned engaged in all kinds of activities, with majestic little pot bellies, alongside colourfully embroidered court officials, flashing teeth in tails. – Bottle after bottle of red wine and copying ink. One cupboard contains hundreds of white bow ties and starched dickies. – The fifth floor, built on top, low bare rooms, the corridors surmounted by a glass roof; in summer, it is unbearably hot. This is the home of the press department. In the corridors, bleached and curled by the heat, lie all the provincial German newspapers from the first months of the war, stacked up in neatly knotted bundles. One can step out onto the roof of the transverse wing. Burnt offerings on the stripped altar to the summer sun. Scorched moss and lichen; the sheet zinc, in which the trap doors and hatches are clad, is red-hot. An abandoned anti-aircraft gun emplacement made from sandbags; flyers; the withered corpse of a cat. In all directions there stretch towering clouds with tumescent crests and craws, but all of them only attaining a certain height and a long way away, their feet obscured by the grey-blue, purple, powdery light. The sea of roofs shimmers and seethes, the Dôme des Invalides unbearably bright. A dull crack, absorbed by the hot walls: a coal-gas bus backfiring. A school party crossing the Esplanade des Invalides. – –
The desolate, looted rooms exert an irresistible pull on the various guard-duty detachments, but also on all kinds of occupying civilians. One comes across stockpiled objects which have particular commercial or sentimental value: paperweights, electric light bulbs, seal boxes for international treaties etc. Somebody stored them away at some point and then either forgot or did not come back for them; or he has been using them to fuel weeks of parcels home. Prowling around the suites of rooms sometimes results in unwelcome encounters, unexpected surprises. The squaddie who has fallen asleep at a magnificent mahogany writing desk while reading “I Was Hitler’s Maid”.** The lift comes gliding up out of the depths of the building at a terrific rate. In one room, a electrolier ablaze with dozens of light bulbs. Complete strangers from completely unknown departments trying out typewriters (there are still some there, but completely shot), browsing the bookshelves. The thick carpets mean one can sneak up without being heard. Every time, one is greeted by the delayed raising of the arm, in fright, the blood running cold or pulse racing, an exchange of short probing glances. – Clocks which suddenly strike; the charred remains of private letters floating up from a fireplace; dripping water echoing from somewhere. The building is unheated the whole winter, et presque tous les tuyaux ont éclaté. The car horns from the Esplanade outside sound strangely thin and distant. It is never an entirely pleasurable experience, picking and rummaging (“Histoire de fouiller, manie de chercher,” as the pompier, who comes to check the fireplugs, describes the situation): there are the constant draughts down your back, and splinters from the doors which have been kicked in.
The stairs. Total darkness, the shallow wooden steps rotten in places from water ingress. An unrolled length of loo roll, woven through the railings, acts as Ariadne’s thread. Another stairwell seems to have served, before the Occupation, as a paper depository. The stacks of premium paper stored there should last several centuries. Piles of forms, over head-height, for télégrammes à l’arrivée, au départ, minutes, dépêches, handouts from one minister to another. Couverts from slim billet-doux format through to a metre long, of varying colours and paper quality. Little ivory-coloured cards for ministerial dîners, with a delicately embossed state emblem. New Year’s greetings with a pen-and-ink view of the Quai d’Orsay, a little ribbon in red, white and blue, signed by Bounel etc. etc. On the wall, three large paintings: one depicts water, smoke, blue sky and a cluster of stovepipe funnels. The French fleet at Kronstadt in 189–. The second, the Congress of Paris 1857. The men still wearing silk knee breeches, bright stockings; the Russian military with terrifically thick epaulettes. A lean, hunched, dark-skinned man in a fez sidling up to the gracious, moon-faced Walewski. Number three: huge blue windows, casting light onto a sea of bald pates and blotting pads: the Hague Conference. On the landing, a plaster bust of France herself in a Phrygian cap. The dust on the eyelids, lips, finger-thick.
It is hot in the library, as it sits directly over the heating. Warm air rises up out of circular vents covered by lattice grilles. The fusty smell of dust and warm paper. The bookcases alternate with busts, statuettes of French foreign ministers. The “commis” and the secretaries of state of the Ancien Régime are present in their entirety, as engravings. Smashed display cases, a couple of medals and coins still inside; ancient portfolios, pen-holders, feathered tricorn hats. The assassination of the plenipotentiaries at Rastatt. Knackfuß’s “Völker Europas, wahrt eure heiligsten Güter”, signed. Medals on the floor, snaking curls of film, sashes. An old copy of Champaigne’s portrait of Richelieu. One can crawl through below to reach a corridor chock-full of bound journals. The presses are to some extent still intact, the books sweltering, squashed together behind fine wire mesh; in other places, almost empty. Odd piles of anti-German literature, diplomatic “colour books” etc. suggestive of large-scale operations aborted.
Ground floor, contrôle des étrangers. The card catalogue, a cabinet with huge drawers which run gently on silent rollers. The rods, on which the cards were threaded, bald, gleaming nickel; only a couple of slips stuck to them. The men in grey and black, with their convoys of trucks which rolled in every 1–2 months, carted everything away. Most of the rooms have already been completely stripped bare, leaving a thin layer of trampled cardboard, flimsy carbon paper covered in typescript and the imprints of dirty jackboots. “Le commissaire spécial d’Annemasse… division spéciale de police… direction générale de la sûreté nationale etc. La nommée X, employée de M. Thyssen à Monte Carlo, se montre paisiblement hitlérienne; elle se trouve en relations intimes avec le chauffeur T…” “À propos du nommé Schneider Franz, figurant sur la cinquième liste des éléments terroristes…” Half a corridor is still stuffed full to the ceiling with green file boxes. When the convoy returns, the soldiers form a chain from this pile out to the truck in the courtyard, its engine running. The boxes, split in places and lashed together with thick paper twine, leap in great arcs from man to man. They pass by a table, at which the little archivist touches and looks at them one last time; it is evidently difficult for him to part with them. He is grey, half the size of the soldiers, the inadequate back of head replaced by a tonsure the size of an old thaler coin. The boxes burst before him with a crash, dust flying into his nostrils. Sometimes one falls on his foot, apparently by accident. He coughs constantly, dabbing at his forehead with his handkerchief; his eyes trail after one box beneath his horn-rimmed spectacles, reaching out with his hands, calling out in a choked, high-pitched voice. In vain: the requisition process cannot be stopped. Refoulés – indésirables – inconnus – “homeless” – Arméniens. Soon he gives up untying the string; he has already broken two nails. One box harries the next – one-two, thud, thump; then the pace slackens, the human chain breaking off, as the pile topples over. Some of the soldiers start to sing; two of them chat across others in the line. One lights up a cigarette, just as a box comes flying towards his stomach; he has enough presence of mind to deflect it with a kick of his boot, without lowering the lighter from his face. “Goal!” Papers fly noisily in all directions. Bloody hell. We’ve got to scrabble around and pick all this lot up now… Christ, who’s done one? You got a dead bird in your pocket or something? Outside, underneath the archway, the roar of engines, beeping horns, rises and falls; a van is hosed down. – Of an evening, one might come across Lieutenant S., with his pipe and slippers, an enormous torch tucked in his trousers. He picks odd papers up off the ground, blowing off the dust and sand, and peruses them, puffing away. Sometimes he folds something up, four times, eight times, and tucks it in his pocket. In the garden, blackbirds call, the stomp of a sentry on gravel…
International crisis at the knocking-shop
The tinned fish from the Soviet embassy was not actually that bad. It was probably sturgeon; at least, the tins featured a picture of a long, stiff fish, with a slightly raised snout. They had sent the stuff off to be opened in the office, along with quarter of a pound of tea, a shiny yellow bag which also stemmed from among the items seized at the Russian embassy. It was now steaming in the cups, a sepialike browny-black; it tasted a bit oily, but was much stronger than the tea latterly on offer at the hotel, supplies of which were reputedly dwindling. There had not been any actual tea leaves in it, just sweepings, ground-up powder. Persian tea, Fräulein Klauter had claimed. – At dinner, talk had been of the article which had appeared in the evening edition of “Je suis partout”, with a load of photos in which one could not see anything apart from a couple of faces, bleached white by the flash. And the raid at the Soviet embassy, which was carried out yesterday, including horror stories of trap doors, dungeons, electric vats for burning body parts which had been found, and which provided an immediate answer to a whole series of unexplained occurrences from recent years. However, the embassy staff could not be led to believe the one about the vats: they were simply a device for destroying files. They should have tried harder with the food. It was too late now. Alex, the driver – his mother was from Alsace, his father a Russian general, and he had lived in Spain for many years – had escaped with a whole briefcaseful. “Gentlemen,” he had smirked, “this is the first and last time we get anything from Russia. There won’t be much else out of them.” He snapped his nicotine-stained fingers. “You can bet your life on it. Furs, caviar. This is not the French we’re talking about here… There’ll be nothing. Absolutely nothing.” A completely impenetrable character, that Alex; beggars belief that someone like him was working for the German embassy. Also, he looked like an orangutan. He could pick up a chair with his teeth.
