Hitler's Boat Page 7

  They both sat in deep padded sofas, which contrasted with the folding chairs reserved for the other guests. We were waiting for the coming and going around the stage to stop so that we could shoot. My mother was there. I took aim with my rifle. “On the first strike of the cymbal,” Fagl said, pointing to the brass band. At the same moment, my mother bent down and took a green envelope out of her handbag which she nonchalantly fanned herself with.

  I would get what I wanted: numbered documents sporting the authentic seal of the Head of State of the Empire. And by the time the codes of this outdated document were broken, the war would most likely be over. The grenadier smashed his cymbals; I shot a bullet in Fagl’s head. Already muffled by the silencer, the shot went undetected. The blood and brains mingled with the roof’s gravel. I heard the grateful applause of three thousand tortured Czechs. I crawled to the other end of the roof facing the river, and wrapped myself once again in the blanket that had kept me warm the previous night, because despite the sun, my teeth were still chattering. I would have to wait at least an hour before I could leave the museum.

  The train dropped me off in New Carlisle. I had put on Fagl’s Polish uniform. I had amused myself by answering the other passengers’ questions in a terrible French, while humming mazurkas and demanding vodka from the conductor. An American family on holiday found me to be particularly “touching,” especially the eldest of the two daughters who tormented me so that I would recite poems in Polish to her.

  I complied by reciting some verses by Schiller, which sounded to her like terrible Warsaw gibberish. “Your poor country,” she said as we rode on in their rental car. I was wary of the silent and sullen father, who had stuffed his hunting rifles and his camping gear between our legs on the back seat, so I exaggerated my drunkenness.

  Two kilometers before arriving in Paspébiac, he suddenly braked and left me in the middle of the deserted road, swearing that I was a bloody French Canadian as true as he was born in Krakow. He said that he would report me to the military police as soon as they got to Percé. He spit in my direction. “You’re all fucking deserters!” he yelled before starting the car. Instead of following the road, I went straight through the fields towards the coast, chewing on maple leaves I tore off along on the way and that had the same taste as my feeble fate; the moose bellowed as if to warn each other of the coming of the Polish hunters from Pittsburgh.

  The Chaleurs Bay glittered under the lighthouse’s rotating beam. The night usually helped the Sons of liberty. In its dragon skin, I found rest. I arrived at the cottage my father had built in 1932 at the tip of Paspébiac. I broke the door down with one strike of my heel. Thankfully, tourists were rare during August of 1943; our usual neighbors had not come that year nor could they attest to the boarded up windows. I ate Franco-American macaroni and canned beans in lard, because I did not dare cook anything should the smoke signal my presence. I waited in the smell of rotten wood, freezing, listening to the rain fall on the tin roof, reading old newspaper, the wet pages of which fell apart in my hands.

  The hell of always leaving, of no longer having a country, and destroying the one you had just begun to build. Where is my Jerusalem? In my mind, I saw Fagl’s face exploding from the inside, from the dum-dum bullet shot. My mother promised me that she would meet me here, where I was to meet with von Gundrich.

  An engine was getting closer, muffled as it went uphill and high-pitched when going down. I waited on the porch, the Mauser on my knees, convinced that I would see the RCMP’s red tunics. But it was Perceval’s Buick that appeared around the curb. The wind from the speed ruffled my son’s hair; he had his head out the window. My mother greeted me with a wave. I hid my weapon as I walked over to greet them. Christophe ran up the path: “Uncle! We came to surprise you.”

  My mother ran her hand in my four-day-old beard. Perceval shrugged off his khaki vest, rolled his sleeves and opened the trunk. “André! Come help me carry the supplies! No, Christophe, don’t touch that weapon!” My son took his hand off the Mauser. I shrugged. “It wasn’t loaded.” As he handed me a heavy box of supplies, he whispered: “It was the other day though… The official press release says that the forces of order shot a Nazi agent; another one is on the run. Who could contradict us? Be careful with the eggs.”

  My mother opened the shutters. We could hear the puff-puff of a fisherman’s barge as he collected his lobster traps near the reef. My son was collecting pinecones and was bringing them back to me, laughing. I drew a spiral on an empty toilet paper roll that I stuck in a potato that was turning placed directly on the stove’s hotplate. Christophe clapped his hand before the never-ending rotation of the circular propeller, just as I had done with my father.

  I was hungry and I devoured the steak Perceval had been able to get us despite the rationing. To be happy, you just need to be with the ones you love, to be with the flesh of your flesh, beautiful, smiling, curious and breathless. This moment happened, not even spoiled by the desire to prolong it. After the meal, my son went to bed with my mother in the bedroom; I went to chop wood in front of the bay with Perceval. “I brought what you had asked Virginia,” he told me. “I caught her just as she was taking the documents out of my briefcase. She told me about you and Lizbeth. I was all right with it. We’re all traitors now.”

  My axe split the log Perceval was holding. He wiped off a spider web that had gotten stuck to his face when he was in the shed.

  “I’m telling you a secret; Virginia doesn’t know about it. I don’t think I’ll see the end of the war,” he said. I’m dying of cancer. And the landing isn’t for this year.”

  “Perceval… I’m sorry.” In truth, that news saddened me deeply. Even though everything – language, religion, and politics – should have made my half-brother an enemy, he was, along with Friedrich, my only true friend.

  “How is Lizbeth?” he asked. “Rotten story. We record all your speeches in our archives. You’re on our most wanted criminals list. You’ll never be able to come back. But what if the traitor became a double agent, a hero after the war, decorated by Her Majesty?”

  “Especially not that! I will never fight against the English, but against the Nazis… maybe! And you’ll have to keep the secret until the end, because there’s a traitor among your staff.”

  “Precisely, we’d like to know how the Germans found out about Churchill’s trip to Quebec. It was a formidably well-guarded secret.”

  We climbed the hill that was overlooking the ocean. With their necks squeezed between their wings, the seagulls were watching us with suspicion; on the anvil of the horizon, sparks glittered under the red sun. He took a green envelope out of his thick jacket. “Here’s the plan the SHAEFF adopted for the invasion of the continent. There’s the code to use to transfer the information to me via Berlin-Radio. No one knows about my offer. If you accept, I’ll remain the only one to know. I’ll say I stumbled on the code by chance, but that I don’t know the true identity of our air-wave informant.”

  Thunder rumbled. Rain began to fall. Then a ray of sunshine lit up the rock. Quickly, a blue circle spread in the sky, above the cliffs carved in the backlight, on top of which the fog frayed; the mountains were still huddled beneath the motionless clouds, and at the entrance of the bay, two rainbows were rising over the Atlantic, like the pillars of an invisible temple.

  “Leave me alone with Christophe. I’ll give you an answer when you come back.”

  I walked them to the car. I took my mother in my arms one last time. I went for a walk in the forest with Christophe. We saw a blue chick fallen from its nest, dragging its broken wings on the ground. It is the noblest of pity to finish off animals that are suffering. But I did not have the courage to do so. I placed it on a cushion in the living room and gave it dry milk and breadcrumbs that it could peck at from the palm of our hands.

  The lichen covered the limbed out pine tress on the side of the rocky beach. The still swelled up sea was crashing against the rocks. On a dead tree, a thrush was puffing itse
lf in shivers; the wet grass had already soaked my shoes. The sun’s refractions in the branches threw nets between the trees. A rabbit sitting still turned its ears towards us. I stopped for a long while, not wanting to scare off the animal, nor did I want to scare off the moment of peace that I could savor for the first time since I had left Quebec.

  I told Christophe the story of the corsair who, surrounded by the British navy, had set rafts on fire around his boat to make them believe, at night, that he also had a large fleet. “Do you want to do the same thing he did? Come!”

  On the beach, we lit up the four woodpiles I had set up as agreed upon with von Gundrich: two at each end of the creek. Then, we sat on a tree trunk as I continued my stories. In my satchel, I had put Perceval’s documents as well as some of Christophe’s things for the trip. With the sky covered, I had the impression of looking out onto nothingness. I suddenly heard the swashing of oars and the rhythmic cries of the rowers: “Eins, eins, eins, zwei, drei!” I kneeled in front of Christopher and told him in German: “Listen, Ich bin dein Vater. And no matter what anyone tells you, I did not betray my country.” I climbed the dune in a hurry and hid the child behind a bush: “Don’t move,” I told him in French. “Don’t speak. I don’t want you to meet my friends. I’ll come and get you soon. You’ll tell Perceval I agree.”

  As I was going back towards the beach, the inflatable raft emerged in the night. I disappeared with the feeling that I was losing my son forever. As we hurried back to the U-Boat 451, I tightened my grip of the documents Perceval had left me.

  Rocked from one side to the other in the steel coffin nailed to the bunk where the smell of gasoline, farts, urine and sauerkraut were making me nauseous, with Commander von Gundrich that had cabled Berlin to give them the result of my mission, I listened to the submarine’s sonar play cat and mouse with the destroyers of the Atlantic fleet, the U-Boat 451 having been given strict orders to avoid all contact with the enemy and to rush to Kiel, to hand me over, me and my precious documents, into the hands of the Fourth section of the Abwehr.

  Gundrich claimed I would get a hero’s welcome; I was not so sure of that. My mission had failed, Fagl was dead and I placed a feeble hope for salvation in the secret false documents I was bringing back. I had left my four-year-old son behind, on a deserted beach on the Chaleurs bay, whispering a secret to him that he would soon forget once in his grandmother’s arms, who would tell him it was all just a nightmare. I had set off again, far from the welcoming and peaceful shores, where I could have lived for thirty years in solitude, looking at myself, like Narcissus, during the summer in the rivers full of agile salmon, during the winter on the ice of the arctic lakes where branches gnarled broken by the wind emerging like shriveled up fingers from the other side of the mirror; I could have transmitted all my knowledge and my vision of the world to a new generation of hopeless people, but I was leaving on my sub-aquatic steed toward a crumbling Europe, towards Germany that was tiring itself in the Ukrainian steppes. I wanted to heal my inner plague so as to not pass it on to my son. And I was returning to that country where it reached endemic proportions, where gigantic factories were taking millions of humans apart on a production line. Because I understood the hate and I was so horridly close to it, I preferred to abandon Christophe. Despite my immense need to love him, I did not know how to talk to him, how to tame him; like my father with me, I only knew how to bring him to a lunar crater where we would disassemble bodies to understand how they work. Because I only dreamt of death and of perfection, I was a fascist deep down, even if at this moment I was about to work for the Allies.

  I could only return to Germany, to explain myself in this vortex of pain and cataleptic jigs. But if I could break this curse, I would return to Quebec to hold my son against my chest again, and Lizbeth would come with me. She would follow me like the lost half of myself.

  I will first recount my return to the capital, to this Berlin that was no longer at sea level, despite the cartographers’ statements, but that was sinking into an abyss, the walls of which were made from the Westphalia Plains, from where we watched the flying fortresses lay, launching eggs from their metal hulls that would hatch into the subway tunnels and shelters as the DCA searched these crisp and aerial waters, like the numb and powerless fingers of a drowning man trying to reach the surface. Never-ending knit of railway tracks that were pulsating beneath the first-class wagon, Hitlerian salute from the needles that spread us out on each side of the covered convoy, heavily loaded with panzers, rolling eastbound, huge horizon where the last wheat fields of Ukraine burned. I held the briefcase tightly to my chest, with red velvet seats on both sides of the two Abwehr officers, high-collared and crested caps like the tufts of an owl, and I was sure, from their frigid looks and their barked orders, that my destination was the incinerator.

  From Wilhemkœnig Station, an armored Mercedes brought us to Admiral Canaris’ office, Tirpiz Quay. My boss for this mission smiled as he looked over the documents and declared, “Fakes, skillfully made! But if the English are trying to fool us, they have their reasons, just like you must, if you work for them. And we, by discovering those hidden motives, we will learn as much as if we had the authentic documents. This deduction game, I am the only one interested in it. I will transmit these invasion-plan documents to the SH, with your condolences and mine for Fagl’s death, a close friend of Heydrich’s. It is a pity he went and pushed his insolence to the point of driving a convertible through a town where he had thousands executed. The people of Prague decidedly have no gratitude. Congratulations and… Heil!”

  Poor Canaris, who’d had his whistle cut with piano wires a week earlier. Refusing to confess until the end, losing his torturers in the logical labyrinth of his replies, but lost through the discovery of his hidden notebooks, though he had them poured into a safe under his safe, but that not even he could resist filling up, as if the means of this solitary and silent speech turned out to be indispensable for the survival of the soul.

  In 1943 though, Canaris had enough weight to save my life and change, if he so judged it, a mission that had ended up a fiasco into a glorious operation of his own service, the Abwehr. Thanks to his protection, which was highly self-motivated since he himself would have been compromised with a failure, I was able to escape a tight interrogation from the Gestapo.

  I walked to the Propaganda Ministry to report back to Hofer from whom I had temporarily been detached for this expedition, which I now saw as completely conceived by the Intelligence Service from beginning to end. The team of Radio-Berlin had prepared a triumphant welcoming for me. Several suspected that this alleged mission was, in reality, an excuse to send me to my death.

  They did not really know what exploits I had accomplished in America, and I could not tell them the juicy details that the Admiral had classified as “sehr geheim,” but the maple syrup and the newspapers I brought back were enough to convince them I had indeed seen Canada again.

  Jacques-Edgar Paradis stayed behind his desk in the writing room and grew darker as I gave news from over there.

  “Two feet in the river with a bag of fries and a bottle of Coke, I watched the boats go by. It was beautiful!”

  “Did you eat hamburgers? Yes? Lucky bastard!”

  The only other Quebecer in Berlin with me, he had lost his access to the microphone when he announced, on July 28, 1942, that the Reichwehr had just freed all of the Canadian prisoners captured in Dieppe from the Saint-Denis camp, mistaking his wishful thinking for reality. Since that incident that had put an end to the live broadcast and forced the Paris-Canada section of Radio-Berlin to emit an erratum, poor Paradis recited prayers in his office where he was sure the Gestapo would come and get him.

  “How are my parents?” he asked me nervously as he twisted his armband with the swastika under a fleur-de-lis. I did not know. “Heartless!” and he left, swallowing a sob. I was never to see him again.

  I approached the studio’s glass wall. The couple greeted me: Suzanne-Fernand Le Baill
y and Paul Dagenais; two old French residents from Montreal sent to Berlin by the Pétain government. A red light went on; the recording was starting. After the Alouette song, which served as an indicator, the Vichyssois expressed their profound sadness as true Frenchmen that the French Canadians were used as cannon fodder for the Anglo-American Empire, not only in Dieppe, but also in North Africa and Sicily, as the obituaries testified, and which they took upon themselves to read to the people. Reminding them that the Führer had offered independence to Quebec, as well as a financial agreement with the Great Reich, they invited along with that gesture, their sound-effects engineer to imitate the sound of bubbling champagne mixed with Seltzer water, to celebrate the results of a Gallup survey done in secret for the federal government, so they said.

  “The Musical Candy Box,” which they hosted twice a week, during which they played songs from Chevalier and Trenet, reached thirty percent of Quebecers, fifty percent in the most remote regions highly equipped with shortwave radios. But it was I, the virulent von Chénier, who obtained the highest ratings, because I continued with our pamphleteer tradition, from Arthur Buies to Jules Fournier, ensuring that the truth was known by all, despite the repressions of British censors.

  That being said, Suzanne-Fernand greeted me with a wink, then putting on a record, she skipped towards me to kiss me and asked if I had heard them from over there. “The Canadians are threatening to scramble our radio waves. What lack of fair play!” she said with a middle-aged girlish pout.