The Rose Café (19 page)

Thinking all this over, it struck me later that there was a certain irony that I should find refuge from military service in the heart of one of the most violent corners of Europe.

We had another bout with the libeccio at this time. It began, as it often did, in the late afternoon, and although it subsided a little at dusk, it came back with another driving blast around midnight. I could hear it hammering the shutters up in the main building, working over the waves in the cove, and howling through the rocks. It was still blowing the next day, the flags and pennants on the yachts in the harbor standing out straight and the halyards slapping incessantly. We waited for dusk, and watched as it subsided around sundown. We had dinner and listened with disappointment as it came up again later in the evening. Dawn the next day was a bright red line of fire, but you could see huge flocks of sheep (the French term for whitecaps) grazing all across the bright blue Mediterranean, all the way out to the horizon. The wind was nonstop, hour on hour of blasting buffets, all through the following night, a white moon illuminating the waters beyond the cove, the silvery white sheep winking in the open sea against the black waters. And it was there again at dawn, pounding, the surf now rising against the causeway, the libeccio catching the spray and sending it in flying sheets over the road to the little beach on the east side. At the end of the cove it was even worse. My cottage was perched high in the rocks and was safe, but the waves began breaking over the causeway that carried on to Ile de la Pietra. No one came out that third night. The guests huddled in the inner dining room, drank cognac and coffee, and sat around in small groups talking, more social than usual, trapped indoors by their common enemy, the wind.

That night something awakened me. Something was different. I could hear the sea surge, the grate of spray on the roadway, the growl of rocks, and the shudder of breaking waves. But the relentless howling had ended. The beast had died.

I lit a candle and went outside. The kindly, moist, warm air had returned and was laden with salt and flowers and the dank scent of moss and algae. I went up to the promontory and sat down on one of the rocks, watching the sheeplike waves sparkling in the moonlight.

This was, after all, I was thinking, a benign corner of the earth: a few nasty winds, a spell of cold in winter, too much heat for a few weeks in summer, but basically a green refuge against the dark events that clashed across the continents beyond.

Lost in this benevolent reverie, I heard someone behind me and turned to see Maggs. She hadn't seen me and had climbed to one of the higher rocks and was standing there, holding her white terry-cloth robe at her throat.

“Oh, you too?” she said, spotting me.

She came down from the height and sat next to me. “What are you doing up so late? Couldn't sleep?”

I told her I would sometimes wake up in the wind, get an idea, and light the candle, but tonight it had been the lack of wind, the strange stillness.

She was not looking her best, I noticed, even in the pale light of the moon. Sleep—or maybe tears—had puffed up her eyes; she looked tired in the shadows, somewhat haggard. She leaned forward on her propped knees, yawned periodically, and shook back her hair, running her hand back along the side of her head nervously. I couldn't help noticing, when her robe fell open at one point, that she was unclothed beneath. But this was no situation for intimacies, she was distracted.

“Bad dream?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, yawning again. “The usual.”

She looked over and saw my notebook.

“What do you do, wake up and write?”

“Yes, if I can't sleep. But it's not a good thing to do. It keeps me awake.”

“I should write. Maybe that would evict my dreams,” she said.

I didn't dare ask her what her dreams were about, but she began to tell me anyway, something about a rain of fire. The stage for this drama was always the Warsaw Uprising, she said.

“There are people who were there who say it was something so horrible that it is impossible to speak about and impossible to keep quiet about. I don't know which is better,” she said.

Her family had had money, she explained, and had lived out in the country beyond the city, in a villa with some land. They had been evicted and relocated in the city. I had heard some of this story already, but never the details.

“For us, it wasn't so bad, really. We had a big enough flat on Marszalkowska Boulevard—my two younger brothers, father, mother, and Aunt Wanda, who lived with us. Uncles and their families coming up for dinner sometimes on Sundays. We had enough food. My father had some sort of connections and we had enough food, even wine sometimes with meals, and schnapps and vodka. It wasn't the way it used to be out in the country where we lived. But I made some friends. I even knew that officer from the German Army. We would talk. He was smart, and I think he too came from money.”

She knew perfectly well there were hideous atrocities going on in the Warsaw Ghetto: “Who couldn't know?” she said. And there were periodic bombings and skirmishes in the streets between the partisans and the occupiers, and of course there was the Ghetto Uprising itself, in 1943. But all that had been contained, more or less separated from her world. Then it all changed after 1944, after the Warsaw Uprising.

The familiar world was turned upside down. The days didn't differ from one to another in that season in hell, she said.

“Howls of bombs, airplanes, roarings in the sky, and our building, it just shook like a rat in the jaws of a terrier one night. Our whole building. Windows crashing, clattering all around, and out in the streets, the smoke and fires—smoke first, then the little tongues of flames, and then whole walls of flame. What a terrible night that was, people running everywhere, dead animals, and Aunt Wanda moaning: ‘Oh my God,' she says. ‘Oh my God, Sacred Heart of Christ,' she says, ‘oh my God.' Even back then, I am thinking, what does God have to do with all this? This is hell itself.

“But then it stopped, and we went outside and walked around in the dark ashes and the smoke, and while we're out there, comes another howling, like evil bats or predatory birds, and then the thuds all around the city. You hear the noise, first the roaring, then the whining, then the
thud
and the explosions. I don't know, in some ways I was angry with the partisans. Why didn't they just leave it all alone, the Jews in their ghettos, the Nazis in our streets? Nazis in our best restaurants, why not just carry on? And just then, low over the building, a big bomber roars over. It was huge and all dark with widespread wings; it was evil incarnate, and then I was thinking, my God, what can you do but fight that. The brave partisans, just kids really. Your age. We lost. German tanks everywhere finishing things off, great smoldering piles where apartment buildings once stood, courtyards where children once played, courtyards, windows, doors, twisted pipes, all in a heap. One building I saw had a bathtub hanging from a standing wall by its pipes, as if it too had been executed, like all the other partisans. The whole city in ruins with people picking through the rubble, looking for potatoes, for coal bits, for evidence of loved ones, maybe. They lost, the partisans. The city lost. Hitler wanted to make an example of Warsaw. Maybe two hundred thousand people dead, no place to sleep for the living, no food.

“We were all in a shelter one night, I remember, my family and I, and someone came in and said they had hit Sisters of the Sacrament.”

She blew out her breath and laughed cynically.

“What an irony, that. Those were the nuns who had voluntarily sealed themselves up against the world. Young women, they would go in there, away from the temporal world, behind grated doors and windows, away from secular life altogether. They thought they could find peace. You go in, take the vows, and you never come out. You're safe. They sang hymns to God and chorales, they held communions, they prayed, they dressed in white and lived a spiritual life, waiting for ascension or salvation from sin or whatever it is they believed in. They were fools, weren't they? Along come the German shells and lay bare their sanctuary; the walls collapse, the interior is revealed, and we see dead nuns in the rubble, still in their virginal whites.

“You see what I mean? Nothing saved. Nothing sacred. Nothing untouched by that deadly rain, and don't think I am the only one who dreams of a rain of fire, anybody who was there must have the same repetitive dream; they just don't talk about it.”

She looked off at the sea. All across the black waters, the white breakers were winking on and off.

“I was only eighteen when it rained …” she said. Her voice cracked.

I couldn't say anything. The light had faded. The joy in the clink of ice in a summer glass. A flight of sparrows. Her curiosity.

After a few minutes' silence I said that I had better go back to bed, on the excuse that I always had to get up early to make Pierrot's coffee.

“Yes, that's excellent. Make his coffee for him tomorrow morning. That sounds so good. Maybe I'll join you. It's all right. I'm sorry,” she said. “It was the wrong time.”

“Will you be all right?” I asked.

“Of course. Awake, out here, with the scrambling sea. What can possibly go wrong? It's sleep that's dangerous,” she said.

chapter eleven

Le Baron According to André

Jean-Pierre came in from the market with a load of local, grass-fed beef a few days after the libeccio dropped, and Vincenzo set to preparing it for a local dish of veal with wild mushrooms—not a typical item on the Rose Café menu. He braised the veal in eau-de-vie and olive oil, then cooked up a few slices of onion and garlic, put back the veal with a few crushed tomatoes, and sautéed it a little more, whereupon he dumped in white wine, another dash of eau-de-vie, and a handful of herbs from the maquis, and then let the whole thing stew. Later he sautéed the mushrooms and stirred them in.

The pot was sitting there on the stove, and as I passed I couldn't help dipping in a hunk of bread to taste it, a trick I had learned from the cardplayers, who would always come sniffing around in the kitchen tasting the dishes if they happened to arrive early.

The sauce had that heady flavor of the wild forest.

I noticed that André had been coming out earlier and earlier during those weeks, and I would often see him at the bar with Peter and Maggs and Herr Komandante, chatting in that odd polyglot combination of languages that the international guests at the Rose Café seemed to be able to assume whenever they wanted to socialize. The man who called himself Dushko happened to be there that night, although he was staying someplace else back in the town.

Of all the periodic visitors at the café, Dushko was the most linguistically versatile; he spoke most of the Romance languages, as well as German and a couple of Slavic languages, and even, I was told by another guest, Hungarian—an impossible language with no apparent relatives in Europe other than a vague association with Finnish and Estonian.

Conversation at the bar was lively but required a little help with translation for André, who spoke only French and the local patois, plus a little Italian. I noticed that Maggs, who was fluent in French, as well as Russian, German, and Polish, was acting as his translator. And I also noticed that she seemed to be filling out the intent of the conversation and the innuendos, as well as the literal words, and that André seemed surprisingly interested in what was being said, so much so that he managed to draw her away into a conversation of their own.

Peter, who was ever the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman, also spoke French and remained above it all, commenting politely and laughing at the appropriate moments. At one point, when the conversation turned to fish, he joined in. He was an avid spear fisherman. In fact that's about all he did, unless the wind was up. On those days he read in the corner of the dining room, nursing a pot of tea.

They were all chatting there happily when le Baron came in. He greeted everyone, ordered a drink, and at one point in the chatter, asked me to tell Jean-Pierre that he would be having dinner that night with Dushko, whereupon the two of them ordered another round and retreated to a table far out on the terrace.

“Who is that guy?” André asked Maggs, as Dushko left.

“I don't know, but he speaks Polish,” she said. “I can't place his accent, though. German I think.”

“But he has an accent in German, too,” Herr Komandante said.

“And in French,” André added.

“He's probably Czech or Hungarian,” Peter suggested. “One of those blokes who gets uprooted, flees his country, drifts around Europe picking up languages, working for whoever will pay, and then can't figure out where he belongs after the war.”

They all stared out at the terrace where le Baron and Dushko were now seated.

“Cards tonight, André?” Maggs asked, indifferently.

“But of course. Cards every night.”

“Don't you chaps have anything else to do?” Peter asked.

The tone, as far as I could determine, was neutral. But André glanced at him before answering, fixing him with a mean squint.

“We are all friends,” he said. “Friends play cards.”

They turned their attention to the terrace again.

Dushko was leaning across the table toward le Baron, speaking with animation, cupping his fingers upward in the southern Italian style, flailing his left hand in the air. Le Baron was smoking lazily, eyeing Dushko through the smoke.

“What do you think it's all about?” I asked from the other side of the bar.

“Money,” André answered without pause and without turning from the scene on the terrace. “He's probably trying to float a loan.”

“How do you know that?” Maggs asked.

“I know le Baron,” André said.

“Where is le Baron from?” Peter asked in all innocence. “I thought I heard an accent in French.”