“I have to go,” Blandine said, gathering up the papers Max had for her, without a word of thanks or of appreciation for the quality of the work. This was her way. But at the back door, as he let her out, she saw the first light of dawn slinking into the sky and trembled and leaned back against him. “The dawn before the darkness,” she said, and turned, and kissed him. They stumbled back through the door into the room of the printing presses and had sex against one of the big dark green machines, without getting undressed. He had to lift her up to enter her and for a moment her feet in their high heels dangled awkwardly. Then she swiftly wrapped her legs around his waist and squeezed. He saw that her height was a matter of sensitivity. To compensate for it she remained almost savagely composed at all times. Even during their congress the hat with the feather remained firmly planted on her head. Four days later the Nazi flag flew over the Cathedral and the darkness began.
The city’s charm was no defense. It ran deep, there were subterranean tunnels of charm underground, subterranean charm hospitals and charm canteens in case of need, and so there were those who had allowed themselves to believe that nothing much would change, the Germans had been here before, after all, and this time as on previous occasions the city would bewitch them and shape them to its ways. Max senior and Anya Ophuls succumbed slowly to this fantasy of a Maginot Line of charm, and their son despaired of them. Gauleiter Wagner, he pointed out, was not a charming man. His parents put on serious expressions and nodded gravely. All of a sudden, when he hadn’t been looking, they had become very old and frail, deteriorating sharply with the same simultaneity with which they had lived the greater part of their married lives. They had always belittled their difficulties, but in the past their lightness had had an undercurrent, a knowing, ironic intelligence. That undercurrent had disappeared. What remained was a sort of foolishness, a forgetting, happy sort of unwisdom. They laughed a great deal and whiled away the days playing card and board games in the shrouded house, behaving as if the times were not out of joint, as if it were an excellent idea that the house was largely shuttered up and the population had fled and the street names were being Germanized and the speaking of the French language and the Alsatian dialect had been forbidden. “Well, dear, we do all speak Hochdeutsch, don’t we, so there’s no difficulty, is there,” Anya said when Max junior brought her the language news. And when Wagner’s minions banned the wearing of the beret, calling it an insult to the Reich, old Max told his son, “I never thought it suited you anyway; wear a trilby instead, there’s a sensible fellow,” and returned to his game of solitaire.
Some days, Max thought his parents believed they could behave the Nazis out of existence, could make them disappear by simply treating them as if they weren’t there. At other times it was clear that they were losing their hold on things, slipping out of the world and into a region of dreams, sliding charmingly and uncomplainingly toward senility and death.
The university district was as deserted as the rest of the city but a couple of bars somehow managed to stay open. One of these was Le Beau Noiseur, and as the desire for resistance grew among the city’s remaining residents this became one of the places where interested parties met. Bill, Blandine, Max and a few others were regulars. Afterwards the innocence and openness of those early days would strike everyone as the height of insanity. The group openly referred to itself as les noiseurs, “the squabblers.” Yet in spite of such foolhardiness its members managed surprising feats. After the French surrender Blandine, for example, became an ambulance driver and visited several internment camps near Metz, where French soldiers were being interrogated before being released and sent home. Nobody paid this tiny woman in uniform much attention, with the result that as she distributed food and medicines she was able to learn a good deal about German troop and supply movements. The problem was that she didn’t know who to give the information to; which did nothing to sweeten her disposition. Her irritability was greater than ever, her tongue sharper, and most of her worst barbs were aimed at Max. The clumsy, hurried episode at the print shop was never repeated, nor did she allude to it. It was evident now that she and Bill were married, though neither of them wore a ring. Max filed away the memory of the sexual encounter, and eventually managed to forget it altogether. Then, twenty years later, while he was researching the period for a book, he made the chance discovery that in the vicious death-throes of the Nazi phase, when the Allies were sweeping across France after the successful D-Day landings, Blandine-real name Suzette Trautmann-had been captured in a refitted garage basement trying to send messages to the liberating army on a ham radio set, and had been executed on the spot. In the breast pocket of her shirt was a passport-sized photograph of an unknown man. The photograph had not survived.
Suppose it was me in that photo, Max suddenly thought. Suppose all those tongue-lashings were inverted signs of love, coded pleas for me to do what she could not do herself: to tear her away from her marriage and make off with her into some impossible wartime Eden. He tried to set aside these speculations, which were only a form of vanity, he scolded himself. But the possibility of misunderstood love went on eating away at him. Blandine, Blandine, he thought. Men are fools. No wonder we made you so mad. That afternoon in the archives when he discovered Suzette Trautmann’s fate he promised himself that if a woman ever sent him such signals again, if a woman were ever trying to say please, let’s get out of here, please please let’s run away and be together forever and to hell with the damnation of our souls, please, he would not fail to decipher the secret code.
He never found out what happened to Bill.
By the fall of 1940, the camps outside the city were being readied for guests, and, right on cue, the citizens of Strasbourg started returning to the city, under German instructions. Tens of thousands of young men, the so-called malgré-nous, were quickly pressed into front-line service in the German army. Max Ophuls understood that, paradoxically, now that everyone was home, however temporarily, it was time for him and his family to leave. The new homes being prepared near Schirmeck at Natzweiler-Struthof, intended for homosexuals, communists and Jews, sounded like a step down in the world. (The gas chamber being constructed down the road from the Struthof facility was still a secret.) It had not been possible to go to the printing works on the quai Mullenheim for some time now, and the family’s money shortage had forced Max to pawn and sell quantities of the Ophuls jewelry and silver. These would be gone soon, and with them the best chance of escape, for which substantial finances would almost certainly be required. Silver was the easiest thing to fence; melted down and anonymous, it told no tales about its provenance. Jewelry carried with it the higher risk of being classified as a looter, a charge carrying the death penalty; so in those confused days before the underworld reestablished its systems, even spectacular pieces, offered in exchange for a pittance, might be refused by the city’s ever-prudent pawnbrokers, those perpetual weathercocks of the winds of change. When the jewels could be fenced-jewels on whose true value the family could have lived for decades-the prices were so low that they barely paid for a week’s worth of essential provisions. Possessions were the past, and the future was arriving rapidly, and nobody had time-or cash-for yesterdays.