The Ambassador’s DS drove out of Grindisheim and two kilometres further on dropped de Vèze and Max at a small flying club on the banks of the Rhine, setting them down by a twin-engined aircraft, high wings, metallic grey with a red stripe along the fuselage.
‘Max, if you promise not to go round telling everybody I use an air taxi instead of tooling around in a DS, I’ll take you to Basle.’
De Vèze stroked the nose of the plane.
‘Same model as Eisenhower had, an Aerocommander, the 680, no, I’m not in that much of a hurry, actually it’s so I can fly a plane. An Ambassador isn’t allowed to pilot his own plane, so I hire a taxiplane, always the same one, an Aerocommander, high wing, gives you the best view of the landscape. And now and then the pilot lets me have the double controls. But that stays between the two of us! Climb aboard, we can talk, Grindisheim — Basle, we fly over the Rhine, beauty, legends.’
In the plane, de Vèze has given Max a big surprise.
Max assumes that de Vèze would start where they’d left off in a conversation they’d both had four years earlier when, a month after that evening in Singapore, he’d visited de Vèze in the Embassy in Rangoon. They’d sat in de Vèze’s office, Max had looked upon the Ambassador with an affection he couldn’t explain and had started telling him about a trip through Haute-Savoie, it happened a long time ago.
A trip taken in 1929, Max on Alpine roads in the company of a lady, a very great lady, a journey that took them from Waltenberg to the French Alps, a road rimmed by precipices but negotiated without mishap, Max had come to see de Vèze’s parents with this lady.
‘She’d agreed to come with me, as friends, we set out from Waltenberg, I’d told her everything, she knew how your mother was. When we got to Araches she sang for your mother, a capella, in German and in French, your mother cried and held Lena close in her arms, you were five, Ambassador, Lena had brought you a present, a big wooden roundabout, fully working, we’d bought it from Weber’s in Zurich, the Blue Dwarf there, you loved it. A two-tier Limonaire, wooden horses. In those days you had an Irish setter who was jealous of your merry-go-round and wanted to play with you, I had long talks with your father and Lena sang for your mother, later your father wrote to me saying that for years afterwards your mother went on singing what Lena had sung to her.’
De Vèze could have talked about all that with Max as a preliminary to more important business, and then tell him how sad he’d been for never having seen Lena again and for not being there when she was buried, he could also have talked about Hans, the way he’d finally met up with him in Geneva, they’d had dinner together, on a boat which sailed round the lake, de Vèze never mentioned a word of all that, in the cabin of the plane he had given Max a big surprise, came straight out with it:
‘How was Arlington?’
‘Terrifying, Ambassador.’
That’s what Lena’s funeral at Arlington was, terrifying, respond at once with something forceful, don’t behave like someone who’s caught off balance and hides behind anodyne comments, move smartly to a point beyond where de Vèze expects Max to be.
‘Terrifying, I wept, in the middle of a military cemetery, I didn’t last out, they folded the flag and they gave it to me, to me, Goffard, a foreigner. And Leone Trice sang “Voi che sapete”, terrifying, much more terrifying than today’s proceedings, Arlington, Americans in full dress uniform, three salvos and bagpipes, military funeral though she hadn’t asked for anything.
‘Two or three top officials had pulled every string in the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House, can you imagine who was there? Music lovers, spooks, generals, aesthetes, patricians, liberals, singers and blackmailers, all clustered round the coffin of Lena Hellström, star-spangled banner, it was mainly the CIA who organised the show, important for them to show that she was one of theirs, that they don’t only work with schmucks and finks, everybody there was wondering how long it was since the CIA recruited her.
‘No one can possibly say they’d never recruited her, she was grandmother to the lot of them, she’d watched them cut their teeth, and before the CIA she’d been in at the birth of the outfit that came before it, the OSS, she’d started before all that, she sang, she had lots of useful contacts among the Germans, the English, they loved her in Berlin, eternal youth, Belle Époque, the great eagle above a frozen lake, she started with the war, in ’14, pre-dated even the OSS, as it happened, she was living in Switzerland with Hans, he left her to go off and play heroes, or rather she walked out on him when she realised he was going to leave her, that he wouldn’t desert just to please her, she felt it was like being at the opera, she left him without saying where she was going, or rather they left each other, Hans always said “over a stupid thing”.
‘She wasn’t all that anxious to see him again but on the off-chance she decided to go to Berlin and take a few singing lessons before returning to the United States, to improve her command of music, the world goes up in flames and she decides to improve her singing.’
Max had gradually pieced together Lena’s story, he felt he could tell it to de Vèze but he didn’t tell all of it, he was afraid to say too much that was definitive, to be too careful about choosing a particular way of putting the events together, the sequences, afraid of suddenly finding he’d gone out on a limb because he’d said too much, he relived Lena’s story as he had relived it in his seat, in the front row at Arlington, in flashes, with clear moments, brief scenes, snatches of dialogue.
He didn’t tell de Vèze everything, he remained the low-voiced enunciator of Lena’s past, enunciating because he had to, but keeping unvoiced the things that were important to him alone, de Vèze catching only what Max allowed to go in his direction, and being happy with that because the last thing he wanted was to have to ask Max to be more specific, letting Max bask in his low murmur, with occasional glances down at the course of the Rhine, everything on the west bank made golden in the sunshine, Lena in 1914, in Berlin, received by her father’s business contacts, rich people, who know titled people who also invite her, she sings well, listens well, she is refreshing say the hostesses, she understands what’s being said, her father made her sit at the dinner table as soon as she was ten, he had many Europeans come to the house.
She knows exactly what expression to put on her face when a man starts talking politics, the pupil who is bored and the pupil who listens, that’s how she learned, her big eyes slow and bored or wide and alert depending on what people tell her, and the men who talk to her have only one desire which is to see her eyes change from bored to bright, they stop caring about what they say and only about the way she listens to them, she never hesitates to interrupt, switching from one subject to another, the content is of no interest to her.
It pleases the Germans to see an American woman who is not hostile, she even goes so far as to pull her hair back behind her right ear, they admire her right ear and her fine head of red hair, they don’t dare admit to themselves what they would like to do to that right ear, they talk and talk just to see her smile and do that again, her hair, the lobe which reappears, can you imagine, a woman who dares touch her body in public, she doesn’t care, she’s American, when she gets bored with a man it’s painful, you’re there with your suit or your uniform, your titles, respected, and this American looks at you as though you were an old tin can.
Mademoiselle Hellström is a test, when you speak in front of other people, the other people listen to you, out of respect, she’s the only one among them who focuses solely on your face and your intelligence, with all the others it’s just manners, so when you’re with her you talk, sometimes she smiles at you and does that thing with her hair, apparently her perfume is French, she tells everyone that her perfume comes from America but in fact it’s more likely to be some bergamot-based French aphrodisiac perfume, no, I’ve not worn ‘Jicky’ since the war, seems in it there’s plum-tree evernia, vetiver and a hint of leather, an American woman, in Berlin, who touches her hair and her ear in the company of men and once a week takes tea at the American Embassy.