Hitler's Boat Read online

  A tuft of red leaves at the top of a maple tree was already announcing the arrival of fall 1938, as if the music had accelerated the passing of time and of clouds that stretched under the setting sun. I invited Lizbeth to a neighboring bar. She agreed to give me an interview for my cultural review. She was taking small sips of cognac.

  Living in Montreal for the past few months, she had arrived in New York in 1937, on board a zeppelin that had left Frankfurt three days before. In the first class lounge, she would play the piano for the rich German industrials that were on the flight to meet with their American counterparts.

  “I gave a concert at the Rockefeller Center. From the bay window beneath the passenger gondola, I could clearly see the patrons from the restaurant, saluting us with their champagne glasses. Since then… badaboom! The Graf Spee exploded. The zeppelins are over! I will remain the only flying pianist for a long time.”

  She hesitated for a moment and then added, “Actually, I was accompanying my husband. He is the one who brought me to Montreal. He was working on a thesis on French Canada for Frankfurt University: Kanada, die schwäche Ritze des Britischen Imperium. In English: Canada, the secret fault of the British Empire.”

  “And now…?”

  “He has gone back to Germany. We became estranged ever since his enrolment in the party.”

  This tale, which she recounted to me in German, fascinated me. It gave me access to a universe different from the bland and devastated one my father had left me with. These German words, which resonated so softly in her mouth, seemed to offer a shortcut to beauty and truth.

  She took me to her hotel. The scent of wet asphalt followed that of wet soil, arranged in patches in the middle of an interior yard, then came the rancid smell of mold in the narrow stairs, the steps creaking as we went up to her room.

  She left me in the living room with a glass of scotch and opened the taps of a giant bathtub raised on brass lion claws. She joined me a half hour later, lathered in oil and perfumes, her blond hair falling heavily on the white bathrobe that was clinging to her still wet legs. She broke away from my first embrace to pull me towards the bedroom where a life-sized angel statue was peacefully smiling at us, and I took her in my arms again, shaking with desire, falling on the bed. She said, “The bedspread…” and I stood up again, feverish, eyes half-closed, pulling away at my clothes in front of the partially opened window, before falling on the bed sheets where she closed her eyes, a moan escaping her painted red lips. Her arms in a cross over the bolster, she was shaking her head, biting her fingers as her stomach caved in.

  Our affair lasted a few months, until she got pregnant. I proposed to her. But first she had to divorce her husband. She refused to tell me about him, except to say that, now back in America, he was working at the German Embassy. She reached him by telex and arranged for a meeting in Washington. Before she left, she warned me that she would get an abortion. She had gotten the number of a doctor whom the senators’ wives had made quite rich. She curtly refused that anyone accompany her. She came back ten days later, still pregnant and not divorced, and declared, “losing our child would have meant the end of our love.”

  She never knew peace. A muffled violence inhabited her: she lived her life as though she were riding a wild horse, her heart beating. She seemed detached from her actions. From point A to point B, she had to fill the role that she had been destined to fulfill. We had a son, who was born with a cry of rage, like all children. It seemed as though she was trying not to love him, fleeing the apartment, and finally sinking into a depression that I attempted to relieve with a trip on the coast of Maine. While my mother cared for Christophe, we walked on the beach at night, in front of what she called her “sea of serenity,” where not a single speck of dust moved in millions of years. But no stupor is eternal and soon thought would see to putting her back in her place, in front of this villa we had rented, and the waves that would be pumping up like long grey muscles.

  War was threatening, it had already killed Lizbeth’s grandfather twenty years ago, on June 7th 1917, at three thirty, on the Messina crest, along with the entire regiment, sent its warning by firing five hundred tons of explosives placed in a network of mine shafts dug up over ten kilometers by General Plumer’s men.

  On the dawn of September 7th 1939, the day after the promulgation of the law of wartime measures, a policeman friend called to warn me that I would be arrested during the day for my defeatist arguments, hindering the recruitment and success of her Majesty’s forces, crimes I had rendered myself guilty of through my pacifist and pro-independence articles. As for Lizbeth Walle, her nationality being that of an enemy power, she would also be promised the internment camp.

  Incredulous, I simply crossed the street over to some friends’ house. Disaster! At noon, a Mounted Police van stopped in front of our apartment door. The red tunics with round hats climbed up the stairs and soon broke one of the windowpanes to the door to get into our home. Holding Christophe against her chest, Lizbeth told me with a strange smile, “I’ve seen this before… They’re going to interrogate the neighbors now. We should leave.” My mind was a blur from too little sleep and too much coffee; fear had a firm grip on me.

  Lizbeth was the one who organized our escape. We retrieved the car that I had parked in an alley and we left for the bank. To avoid raising the teller’s suspicions, I left a bit of money in my account. We had a few hundred dollars.

  Christophe was playing with his mechanical bunny. “We have to leave him in your mother’s care,” Lizbeth said. I knew she was right. Still an infant, he could not travel in the precarious conditions that awaited us. My half-brother Perceval’s house was located in front of a park in Westmount. I parked on the opposite side, beneath the quivering oaks, and I waited for him to leave the house, a cane under one arm. He cheerfully marched up the hill towards the Atwater street station. The sun was heating the velvet back car seat with broken springs on which Lizbeth had laid a naked Christophe after breastfeeding him one last time. She bent over him, as he was wriggling and smiling, hiding him under her heavy blond hair and speaking to him in German. With his mouth open, he seemed to feed off her, for lack of milk, a bitter wisdom. Then, she wrapped him up in a cloth and handed him to me.

  “Don’t stand there in front of the door! Your son will freeze!” my mother cried. But I stubbornly stayed on the balcony. Over my shoulder, she saw Lizbeth, on the other side of the park, smoking a cigarette as she leaned on the hood.

  “We have to leave for a while…” “Wait… Your brother could…” She took Christophe from me and held him close to her. I kissed them both. “Don’t leave with that German woman!” she cried as I was walking away.

  Already, at the Petawawa Camp, the Arcand and LanctÔt Nazis were about to trade their blue Marian shirts for a stripped outfit with a huge red circle on the back of the cap and the tunic to facilitate the shooters’ task in case of escape attempts, choosing exile over rotting in the Ontarian forest with its anglophile and centralizing mosquitoes. I crossed over to the United States by a deserted and hilly Eastern Township road. We found ourselves in New York two days later. We lived in Brooklyn for a while at a French painter friend of mine, who had offered us his sofa bed along with the cans that filled his kitchen cabinets. We would breathe in fresh air from the security ladder; the metal blades of the steps left imprints on our thighs.

  She was blocking her ears. “I’m listening to my blood flow. It’s like it will never stop.” Love pulled us together. We were going back to the beginning of the world, with the sun setting on the edge of the asphalt-covered rooftops, to burst in the dressing table’s mirror, with the scalding coffee and burnt toast that we ate as we read the New York Times.

  My mom, whom I would call regularly, refused to bring us the child, because she thought our situation was too risky. My brother’s insistence on obtaining our address persuaded me that he was collaborating with the police. I answered that we had no fixed domicile. Finally, friends would confirm that
they were attempting to deport us.

  While I was looking for work in the press and translation bureaus, Lizbeth would often go to the German consulate to obtain an extension on her passport. One day, she came back with mail she had received from Berlin: a letter stamped with a bas-relief of Hitler’s profile; a heinous clown mask with a fixated and menacing stare. She read, short of breath, fingers trembling, and then she burst out into laughter. She pursed her lips and could not stop the flow of tears.

  “I send these writings to the flames!” she said in metallic French. She kissed the letter, folded it and slipped it underneath her corsage. “The future will emerge from the embers of our hearts! Heil!”

  The works of her father, the pastor, had just been burnt in Germany’s public squares. From a Dachau re-education camp, he wrote to her to tell her not to come back to Germany as long as the Nazis were in power. What little mistrust I had left had fallen; Lizbeth was one of the victims.

  One night, Lizbeth convinced me to take her to the restaurant at the Rockefeller Center, where she had seen her first Americans from the zeppelin’s gondola. The waiters in white vests with golden buttons brought dry martinis to the perfumed and diamond- covered patrons, faces floated over the ships that were trailing along in the distance on the Atlantic, somewhat tempting targets for the submariners, who still respected the neutrality, in theory, of these cargos supplying whole armies from the United Kingdom. “I arrived through there,” She said as she pointed to the emptiness over us.

  This luxury carried me to the first level of ecstasy. From the speakers, Mozart quartets played in the dining room, the matchbooks had Blake and Goethe quotations on them, the paneled walls were adorned with impressionist paintings.

  She was magnificent and she wore a pearl necklace. I absorbed her musk perfume from a distance. Tall, she always seemed strong and self-assured, but while making love, she would crumble at my first touch, eyes closed, listless, hot and abandoned, brashly emptied of all her energy and will. She ordered tea.

  A gust of wind blew and shook the 44th-floor windows. Only one colossal customer, who had just arrived, guzzled his vodka and smashed the glass on the parquet floor. A busboy cleaned up the mess without a word. Our neighbor lit a cigar. An angular face, strong eyebrow arches, and a hooked nose created deep shadows over the very pale skin; fierce eyes, as if mounted on ball-bearings in the middle of their sockets, were devouring the space around him, stopping on Lizbeth, who was pinching her nose because she was bothered by the acrid smell of tobacco. She pointed to the cigar, which he immediately stubbed out. Lizbeth smiled and said “Vielen Dank.”

  Her eyes flittered about the spectacular point where she met the other’s gaze; her face lit up just like when she played a fortissimo during a sonata: the high point of a mechanism as complex and refined as the ones from the Nuremberg bell-tower’s automated ringers.

  Soon, she was talking in that rocky language that I loved in her mouth so much, but was still understanding with difficulty. She motioned toward me with her chin, and agreed. The other man handed her a card that she slipped in her bag, snapping the golden clasp shut. He rose, bowed, and clicked his heels. She pouted behind the veil of her velvet hat.

  “That was my husband, Ernst Hofer,” she told me. “He works for the New York Propaganda ministry office. I explained that you couldn’t find a job as a journalist in the United States because of your opinions. He said he would like to meet with you.”

  Simple coincidence could not explain this meeting that Lizbeth had clearly arranged behind my back. I was furious. “I will never work for the Nazis. And I’ll ask you to never speak to this man again!”

  I immediately regretted my harsh tone. I’ve never had a worse enemy than my own volatile temper. Seeing her turn pale, I should have apologized. But I remained silent, awkwardness growing between us. She slowly stood, the tightness of her skirt forcing her to rock her hips, while one hand pressed the ivory cigarette case against her waist. Her eyes avoided me.

  All at once, the fatigue from the travel, the fear of being arrested and the anguish of spending my last few dollars in this five-star restaurant all came together to drag me down and paralyze me as she walked away towards the lift. The other man tried to stop her by lowering his hand and throwing me an inquisitive glance, but she continued on her way. He left a large note to pay for the bill and hurried towards the exit, just in time to catch the lift and go down with her.

  Convinced they would finish the evening in the same bed, devoured by jealousy, I walked towards Soho to console myself the best I could. When I came back at dawn, I ran into my friend who was reading in the living room, his head shining beneath the lampshade. He looked at me with pity.

  “She waited for you all night without sleeping. She left about an hour ago with her suitcase. She said it was for the best.”

  I calmly placed my hand on the wall in front of me and smashed it with a heavy ashtray. Then, I collapsed onto the floor, whimpering.

  “She didn’t want to tell me where she was going. But she left this letter for you.”

  Scared by my violence, my friend stretched his arm to give it to me. I had to use my teeth to tear one end of the envelope. “Go back to Montreal; retract what you said to be pardoned. Save yourself and our son too.”

  I put the trench coat and wet felt hat back on. It was still raining. I took her umbrella, convinced I would find her quickly, completely soaked. I went back to all our favorite places: Central Park, the vending machine cafeterias, the little windowless bars, the cinemas with the floors sticky from soda. Sometimes, I thought I had spotted her, then a detail would become more apparent and I would realize it was a stranger I had mistaken her for from a distance. I realized with worry that I was haphazardly looking for my beloved in the biggest city in the world. I walked relentlessly, only stopping for a coffee and a sandwich at the end of a table with a view of the outside.

  After two days, I was desperate: she had left the city no doubt. Her absence burned me. The eighteen months of our life together, the German lessons given from Schiller and Goethe, the trips to Quebec, the dinners at my brother’s speaking of religion and politics, the days spent caressing each other as the cold burn of winter raged outside, the peace she brought me when she would lie on top of me.

  My heart was ticking like a time bomb. I was only moving forward to not stay still, because a twenty-four-year-old man crying on the corner of the street might attract people’s attention, but the one who walks in long strides hides his face behind his movements. I fumbled with the small wad of dollars at the bottom of my small pocket; I would soon not have enough left to eat, unless I sold the Packard, which I was barely using to save on gas.

  A human being resembles nothing. He has no shape. To see this abyss that digs itself and sucks, one only needs to close his eyes. Beneath the illusion of order, one will feel the night reinventing fate at random. Already, on September 26, 1939, the day of Warsaw’s capitulation, two weeks after Her Majesty had proclaimed a “state of war with the German Reich in our Dominion of Canada,” my story had dropped down a block, like a dark and desolate star, gifted with a malevolent force of attraction.

  In Manhattan, on the corner of 5th Avenue and 15th street, in the shadow of the monolithic Empire State Building, blew the most violent winds of the city. They were coming from the Hudson River, this luminous and milky rectangle between the metallic geometry of the skyscrapers; the winds were pouring in from Quebec, barely slowed down by the Adirondacks up north. They were weaving between the banks, the trusts, the holdings, the hotels, like the pipes on a gigantic organ, and they were freezing my face and my thoughts. Encased in a concrete block, a steel pole was vibrating and its tip was tracing obscure signs a hundred meters above my felt hat. A fall out of time, in a damned, somber, negative space; a reverse illumination, darkening. Everything that was stopping, had already stopped.

  Before going back to Brooklyn, I decided to patrol the neighboring area of the German consulate in my ca
r for a while. Ernst Hofer appeared from the corner of a building. His black eyes as expressionless, as balls of tar were darting through the crowd as if looking for a sniper. Of all the chances that have happened in my life, I consider this one as the most miraculous. Without it, I would have gone back to Montreal to raise my son and to become a loyal little British subject of Her Majesty. I stretched over the seat to open the passenger side door that the wind almost blew off its hinges. Hofer bent down and saw me; without hesitating, he sat next to me. “Herr Chénier! I would have so liked to talk to you the other night. You are looking for your wife? Disappeared three days ago? Tutt! Tutt!” He seemed surprised. Up to then, I thought he would have been aware of Lizbeth’s departure.

  It was the end of the day for the office workers. A policeman pointed his club at me: no parking! I started the engine, driving over newspapers that were fluttering here and there above the pavement like spooked bats. “I have to leave the New World soon,” continued my passenger. “The Americans are forcing us to reduce our consulate workforce; they are accusing us of espionage. I am but a mere government official to Doctor Gœbbels. Poorly paid at that.”

  He looked at his watch. “I have a meeting at our consulate. Come with me. The clerk at passports might be able to give you more information.” His lips were constantly twitching as if their discomfort was translated into words, as biologically trained as the songs of the whales.

  Following Hofer’s indications, I parked in the consulate’s interior yard. The immense reception hall resonated with tons of rings, each one abruptly interrupted by an office worker as he brought the phone to his temple like a gun to blow his brains out. Our shoes pounded against the marble.

  A low political mass was celebrated here with the telex plugged directly into the hereafter of Berlin, placed like a votive hostel. Communications officers accomplished the mystery of translating the numbered cables in the correct order. Warned of our arrival by his secretary, Eckel, a balding, pot-bellied worker with almost no eyebrows came out of his office and stiffened for a brief moment, his arm in the air: “Heil Hitler!”