An Infinity of Mirrors (26 page)

The Wehrmacht buying office employed over two hundred people to procure such shipments to Germany as ten tons of playing cards, one hundred and seventy-six tons of frying pans, and thirty-four tons of shoe polish. The simple purchase of cabbage created hostility from all of one's neighbors. There was not enough food, there was not enough room, and the pressure of everyday life generated unexpected antagonisms.

And yet never was so much money spent in France. Savings came out of woolen socks to be squandered. People who had never smoked bought cigarettes frantically in the black market; alcoholism increased even though liquor was ten times more expensive than before the war, and almost impossible to obtain. Women who had put away half a million francs after ten years of hard work were dressed by the best couturiers and went to theatres and restaurants where they had never been before. Dairy keepers and grocers were so fawned upon that they became arbiters of the public taste: they made or ruined plays, destroyed or established the reputations of restaurants. Everywhere shortages created status and catered to the worst in human behavior.

For the young in heart there were several dozen brothels that were better heated than the cinema palaces. Some had been there for a hundred years; others, newly established by the Wehrmacht, imported girls from German farms. There were bordellos for soldiers, for warrant officers, and for officers above field rank. At the Platzkommandatur fuer Gross-Paris in the Place de l'Opéra, a uniformed young lady at the information desk kept an official file of all brothels German soldiers were allowed to visit. By regulation, soldiers had to leave all brothels through the back door, where a German Army doctor administered an injection against VD. There were brothels for civilian workers, and special brothels for the tourists from all over the new Europe of which the favorite was the house with the double, gold-plated bathtub in the Chausée d'Antin. There were houses which displayed placards in two languages forbidding Germans to enter at all. The tallest whorehouse was the nine-story building in the rue Chabanais which had reopened for business at three
P
.
M
. on the day of the arrival of the German Army in Paris. The most populated house was in the rue des Renaudes, near the Ternes. The girls at the Sphynx on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet in Montparnasse were often paid by army generals in blank permits.

But there were also whores outside the
maisons closes
. These were the men who wrote the daily newspapers. Their hygiene was assured by the Presse-Gruppe of the Propaganda-Abteilung, and their abortions were performed either by the Kommando-stab at the Hôtel Majestic or by Dr. Goebbels' ministry far off in Berlin. Their lewd exhibitions were the daily press conferences at which the news was explained to all editors, and those books, films, personalities, and events best avoided were singled out. Interdiction was simplified by forbidding the publication of anything pertaining to Austria, Czechoslovakia, England, Poland, the United States, and Yugoslavia. Whenever the Propaganda-Abteilung suspected the strength of the management of a newspaper they took it over and published the journal themselves; at one point there were fifty-one such publications, with a total daily circulation of just over three million. Labor was shipped to the brutal labor camps in Germany by the hundreds of thousands. It is doubtful that any of them were comforted by the admonitions from his pulpit of the Bishop of Lisle, who urged France to submit willingly to forced labor in Germany, not so much as a patriotic duty but as a form of national penance and to hinder the spread of Communism.

Some intellectuals took comfort in recalling the absorption of the Franks by the Gauls. No doubt freedom was desirable, but would not freedom at this moment simply mean disorder? “What kind of a country is this?” asked Alfred Fabre-Luce, a Frenchman filled with the greatness of the Fuehrer. “With a constantly falling birth rate, with minds fuddled with drink, with an army which committed suicide, how could such a country stand up to Germany? Inexorably, Europe is coming into being—forever excluding England.”

Nine

When Admiral Canaris came to see him in the rest hospital in Pomerania, Veelee could not have felt more surprise if Winston Churchill had strolled into the room. The Admiral was small and serious, and on that afternoon somewhat diffuse. They chatted about Hansel and about General Stuelpnagel, and then Canaris said, “Speaking of Stuelpnagel, I think I can anticipate your next assignment, General.”

Veelee sat up even straighter.

“I've just been through to Paris,” the Admiral continued, “and I must say that Stuelpnagel was very firm about having you on his staff.”

“Me? He requested me? You are very good to tell me that, sir. Frankly—” He shrugged. “Well, I was sure I was about to be assigned to the Home Army.”

“Germany needs your experience, General—and your traditions.”

“What is the job, sir? They can hardly need a tank commander in Paris.”

“Signals. A lively command.”

Veelee's voice grew softer and happier. “My son is in Paris.”

“Has it been a long time since you have seen him?”

“Four years. But he's only seven, so they are four big years.”

“Well then, I envy you, General.”

“My wife is there, too, but I have changed a little since they last saw me.”

“Change is nothing. It is when life does not change that there must be concern.”

“They'll get used to the arm easily enough,” Veelee said with certainty. “I have already. But this face is something else again.”

“There is a trick you might use.”

“I'll take any ideas you have, sir.”

“Remembering pictures of your father and grandfather, perhaps a monocle wouldn't be such a bad idea, you know.”

“A monocle over a socket? I like that. Conspicuous waste. Real ostentation. I could prop it in there, even if the muscles don't work.”

“It would add a glittering sort of a deception, really.”

“It would, wouldn't it? And very old school.”

There was a pause, and then Canaris said, “Von Stuelpnagel showed me your letter some time ago—the one about your meeting with the Fuehrer at Praha. Hope you don't mind.”

“I was rather upset.”

“It must have been a shocking moment for you.”

“I hope the letter didn't embarrass you, sir. Officially, I mean.”

“Not at all. I travel a bit, you know. Quite a few of our friends concur with your feelings.”

“Then why hasn't anything been done?”

“It will be done.”

Veelee took a deep breath. “I hope I may be included in such plans, whenever or wherever they may happen, sir, and may they happen the day after I walk out of here.”

The little Admiral stood up. “Have faith,” he said. Veelee started to rise, but the dizziness still came over him when he moved. “Here,” the Admiral said, “I have just remembered something—the reason I am here today.” As he smiled at Veelee in a winning and a conspirational manner, his hand went into his side pocket and came out again. “I just happen to have a monocle of Fritsch's.”

Veelee was against the Fuehrer on what really amounted to social grounds. The propriety of the German Army had been offended by that vulgar and murderous man. His objections did not recognize the moral putrescence with which the Fuehrer had infected Germany, making it a stink of rotten death in the nostrils of the world; nor had he the knowledge to assess what the Fuehrer had done to destroy the country physically, its precious institutions, the minds of its youth and its capacity to grow taller and straighter. Veelee had not been trained to think at all, only to act in the framework of the German Army. Since the Fuehrer had offended that army, he must be punished and then preferably banished into death.

Neither Veelee, nor the Admiral, nor anyone else in the old-line German military establishment could ever have understood that they could never succeed in bringing the Fuehrer down because they were hunting him in the wrong dimension, in a wholly different forest.

Hansel was on home leave, and he came to see Veelee with the news that he had been taken out of the Bendlerstrasse and given an army corps in the center of the Eastern front.

“We might as well be led by a blind traffic policeman,” he said as he settled down in an armchair in the hospital room. “Say! I like the effect of that monocle. I'd never guess that you have only one eye. You know, as one of my young men said, the Fuehrer has a superb grasp of military deployment and logistics up to the level of a regiment—well, perhaps a company. He certainly falters when he begins to play with a whole division, he is totally lost when it comes to directing the movements of a corps, and blacks out utterly when he tries to figure out what one does with an army. Therefore, if you consider that this pill-happy maniac is shuttling army
groups
in and out and back and forth, you may have some remote, shadowy idea of the havoc he is manufacturing and of the German blood he is pumping into the ground.”

“Why hasn't he been shot?”

“What did you say?”

“Why hasn't he been arrested and shot? We happen to surround him with three army groups and a full reserve.”

“There are plans, you know, Veelee. Is it entirely safe to talk here?”

Veelee nodded.

“Well, he's the luckiest swine you can imagine. Twice it was agreed that he should be killed on a fixed date, and twice he changed his plans at the last moment. Not only that—he looks us in the eye and says that he knows we will try to kill him and that changing his plans is what has kept him alive for so long.”

“But even we must have a few fanatics!”

“On the whole … no.”

“No one will drive into his bodyguard with a heavy tank and finish him?”

“Oh, of course,” Hansel said, mildly and patiently. “The real problem is that we have no leaders. The field marshals keep saying they are bound to the Fuehrer by that oath of allegiance—which in most cases means they are merely frightened silly of him, because no reasonable man seeing the Fuehrer every day could take the oath seriously any longer. As for the others, they are like panicked horses in a burning barn. They want action, but each one wants to charge off in a different direction and there is no one leader strong enough to hold them in line.” He shook his head sadly. “By God, if Seeckt were still here—”

“Seeckt! What of the young men—the majors, the colonels? To hell with the generals. Why don't the young men act?”

“It's our system, Veelee. They will act—I
know
they will act—but because of the chain of command they must be convinced that we have failed, that we cannot move. Time robbed us, you know. Beck could have taken charge of this execution, but he is sick and old now. Hammerstein is dead. And someone has to be in command, Veelee—that is the way we are. You know that.”

“Tell them something from me, Hansel. I respectfully recommend that they assign a sound staff colonel to procure a tank and a crew. No more bother with decisions from field marshals. The tank will go through any building to find him and blow him into the sky. With three days of staff work and three minutes of action, we could all try to become sane again.”

When Gretel and Gisele came to the hospital they burst into tears when they saw Veelee. He fumbled in the drawer of the night table and took out his monocle and waved it jauntily. “Belonged to von Fritsch,” he said, fitting it carefully into the hollow of his face. “What you don't know,” he said, “is that the edges of this thing have been covered with glue.”

“You look exactly like Grandfather,” Gisele said.

“Like Grandfather when Grandfather was laid out in his casket,” Gretel said.

“They start me on the sun lamp tomorrow,” he told them. “I'll look like Baldur von Shirach before they're through with me.”

“Oh, Veelee,” Gisele said, “I hope not.”

“This hospital smells worse than any I have ever been in,” Gretel said.

“Just today, perhaps,” Veelee said. “We are very full.”

As they sat at the end of the bed he realized that they did not look well either. Their faces were sallow and puffy from too much starch and too little of anything else. Gisele had developed a tic at the left corner of her mouth which twitched incessantly. Miles-Meltzer had been killed in a bombing attack on Hamburg.

“You are being posted to Paris, Veelee?” Gretel asked.

He grinned. “You probably know my hotel.” Only one side of his face moved with the grin, and he noticed that they both looked away for an instant. He would have to learn not to smile when he saw his son again.

“Hah!” Gretel said with delight. “I do-the Royal Monceau. You have a two-room apartment on the quiet, court side.”

“Gretel, you know more about the army than Keitel.”

“My God, Veelee, I hope so.”

“Will you see Paule in Paris, Veelee?” Gisele asked.

“Of course he'll see Paule, you goose.”

“I don't know,” Veelee said.

“But you will want to see Paul-Alain?”

“Yes.”

“When you see Paul-Alain you will have to see Paule. There is no other way.”

“All right.”

As the two sisters went down the hospital corridor they were depressed and silent. Not until they left the building did Gretel speak. “My God, he looks awful. Why didn't Hansel prepare us?”

“We saw him at a low point, Gretel. He'll get better from now on.”

“Do you think I should write to Paule and prepare her?”

“Yes.” Gisele sighed heavily. “If only she would answer. If only we knew that she got the letters.”

“She was very sad.”

“But you could write to her through Clotilde, as you always do.”

“But should I this time? I suppose he will want to surprise her.”

“Men are mad for surprises. Only men like surprises. To give them, not to get them.”