The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (50 page)

Once, Ernst was a Werewolf concealed in civilian clothes. His uniform was gone, and his arms and identity papers buried in the mud outside a village whose name he cannot remember. It begins with L. He lay on the ground vomiting grass, bark, and other foods he had eaten. He had been told to get rid of the papers but not the arms. He disobeyed. He walked all one night to the town where his mother and stepfather were. The door was locked, because the forced-labor camps were open now and ghosts in rags were abroad and people were frightened of them. His mother opened the door a crack when she recognized the Werewolf’s voice (but not his face or his disguise) and she said, “You can’t stay here.” There was a smell of burning. They were burning his stepfather’s S.S. uniform in the cellar. Ernst’s mother kissed him, but he had already turned away. The missed embrace was a salute to the frightening night, and she shut the door on her son and went back to her husband. Even if she had offered him food, he could not
have swallowed. His throat closed on his breath. He could not swallow his own spit. He cannot now remember his own age or what she was like. He is either thirty-four or thirty-six, and born in Mainz.

Willi is always reading about the last war. He cuts up newspapers and pastes clippings in scrapbooks. All this is evidence. Willi is waiting for the lucid, the wide-awake, and above all the rational person who will come out of the past and say with authority, “This was true,” and “This was not.” The photographs, the films, the documents, the witnesses, and the survivors could have been invented or dreamed. Willi searches the plain blue sky of his childhood and looks for a stain of the evil he has been told was there. He cannot see it. The sky is without spot.

“What was wrong with the Hitler Youth?” says Willi. What was wrong with being told about Goethe Rilke Wagner Schiller Beethoven?

Ernst, when he listens to Willi, seems old and sly. He looks like a corrupted old woman. Many of the expressions of his face are womanish. He is like the old woman who says to the young girl, “Have nothing to do with anyone. Stay as you are.” He knows more than Willi because he has been a soldier all his life. He knows that there are no limits to folly and pain except fatigue and the failing of imagination. He has always known more than Willi, but he can be of no help to him, because of his own lifesaving powers of forgetfulness.

It is the twentieth anniversary of Stalingrad, and the paper found at the bus stop is full of it. Stalingrad—now renamed—is so treated that it seems a defeat all around, and a man with a dull memory, like Ernst, can easily think that France and Germany fought on the same side twenty years ago. Or else there were two separate wars, one real and one remembered. It must have been a winter as cold as this, a winter gray on white and full of defeat. Ernst turns on the radio and, finding nothing but solemn music, turns it off. From the court he hears a romantic tune sung by Charles Aznavour and is moved by it. On an uncrowded screen a line of ghosts shuffles in snow, limps through the triumphant city, and a water cart cleans the pavement their feet have touched. Ernst, the eternally defeated, could know the difference between victory and failure, if he would apply his mind to it; but he has met young girls in Paris who think Dien Bien Phu was a French victory, and he has let them go on thinking it, because it is of no importance. Ernst was in Indochina and knows it was a defeat. There is no fear in the memory. Sometimes another, younger Ernst is in a place where he must save someone who calls,
“Mutti!” He
advances; he wades in a flooded cellar. There
is more fear in dreams than in life. What about the dream where someone known—sometimes a man, sometimes a woman—wears a mask and wig? The horror of the wig! He wakes dry-throated. Willi has always been ready to die. If the judge he is waiting for says, “This is true, and you were not innocent,” he says he will be ready to die. He could die tomorrow. But Ernst, who has been in uniform since he was seven, and defeated in every war, has never been prepared.

In the court it snowed and rained and the rain froze on the windows. By three o’clock he could not see without a light. He pinned the curtains together, switched on the table lamp, and lay down on the floor. In the paper he read the following:

It must mean something. Would Willi cut this out and paste it in a scrapbook? Willi, who will be home in two or three hours, is made sick by the smell of cigarette smoke, and so Ernst gets up, undoes the curtains, and airs the room. He must have fallen asleep over the paper, for it is quite dark, and the child and his mother have returned from their walk. The room is cold and smells of the courtyard instead of cigarettes. He shuts the window and curtains and looks for something to read. Willi has saved a magazine article by an eminent author in which it is claimed that young Werewolves were animals. Their training had lowered the barrier between wolves and men. Witnesses heard them howling in the night. When the judge arrives, Willi will say to him, “What about this?” Ernst begins the article but finds it long-winded. He grins, suddenly, reading, without knowing he has shown his teeth. If he were seen at this moment, an element of folklore would begin to seep through Europe, where history becomes folklore in a generation: “On the Rue de Lille, a man of either thirty-six or thirty-four, masquerading in civilian clothes, became a wolf.” He reads: “Witnesses saw them eating babies and tearing live chickens apart.” He buried his arms and his identity in the mud outside a village whose name he cannot remember. He vomited bark and grass and the yellow froth of fear. He was in a peasant’s jacket stiff with grease and sweat. Ernst is rusting and decomposing in the soft earth
near a village. Under leaves, snow, dandelions, twigs, his shame molders. Without papers he was no one; without arms he was nothing. Without papers and without arms he walked as if in a fever, asking himself constantly what he had forgotten. In the village whose name began with L, he saw an American. He sat throwing a knife at a mark on a wall. He would get up slowly, go over to the wall, pull out the knife, walk slowly back, sit down, balance the knife, and aim at the mark, holding the knife by the blade.

Ernst is going home, but not to that village. He could never find it again. He does not know what he will find. Willi, who goes home every year at Christmas, returns disgusted. He hates the old men who sit and tell stories. “Old men in their forties,” says Willi, who does not know he will soon be old. The old men rub their sleeves through beer rings and say that if the Americans had done this, if von Paulus had done that, if Hitler had died a year sooner … finger through the beer rings, drawing a line, and an arrow, and a spear.

Having aired the room, and frozen it, Ernst lights another cigarette. He is going home. In Willi’s scrapbook he turns over unpasted clippings about the terrorist trials in Paris in 1962. Two ex-Legionnaires, deserters, were tried—he will read to the end, if he can keep awake. Two ex-Legionnaires were shot by a firing squad because they had shot someone else. It is a confusing story, because some of the clippings say “bandits” and some say “patriots.” He does not quite understand what went on, and the two terrorists could not have understood much, either, because when the death sentence was spoken they took off their French decorations and flung them into the courtroom and cried, “Long Live France!” and “Long Live French Algeria!” They were not French, but they had been in the Legion, and probably did not know there were other things to say. That was 1962—light-years ago in political time.

Ernst is going home. He has decided, about a field of daffodils, My Country. He will not be shot with “Long Live” anything on his lips. No. He will not put on a new uniform, or continue to claim his pension, or live with a prostitute, or become a night watchman in Paris. What will he do?

When Ernst does not know what to do, he goes to sleep. He sits on the floor near the gas heater with his knees drawn up and his head on his arms. He can sleep in any position, and he goes deeply asleep within seconds. The room is as sealed as a box and his duffel bag an invisible threat in a corner. He wades in the water of a flooded cellar. His pocket light is soaked; the damp batteries fail. There is another victim in the cellar, calling
“Mutti,”
and
it is his duty to find him and rescue him and drag him up to the light of day. He wades forward in the dark, and knows, in sleep, where it is no help to him, that the voice is his own.

Ernst, on his feet, stiff with the cold of a forgotten dream, makes a new decision. Everyone is lying; he will invent his own truth. Is it important if one-tenth of a lie is true? Is there a horror in a memory if it was only a dream? In Willi’s shaving mirror now he wears the face that no superior officer, no prisoner, and no infatuated girl has ever seen. He will believe only what
he
knows. It is a great decision in an important day. Life begins with facts: He is Ernst Zimmermann, ex-Legionnaire. He has a ticket to Stuttgart. On the twenty-eighth of January, in the coldest winter since 1880, on the Rue de Lille, in Paris, the child beaten by his mother cries for help and calls,
“Maman, Maman.”

T
he great age of the winter society Walter Henderson frequents on the French Riviera makes him seem young to himself and a stripling to his friends. In a world of elderly widows his relative youth appears a virtue, his existence as a bachelor a precious state. All winter long he drives his sporty little Singer over empty roads, on his way to parties at Beaulieu, or Roquebrune, or Cap Ferrat. From the sea he and his car must look like a drawing of insects: a firefly and a flea. He drives gaily, as if it were summer. He is often late. He has a disarming gesture of smoothing his hair as he makes his apologies. Sometimes his excuse has to do with Angelo, his hilarious and unpredictable manservant. Or else it is Mme. Rossi, the
femme de ménage
, who has been having a moody day. William of Orange, Walter’s big old ginger tomcat, comes into the account. As Walter describes his household, he is the victim of servants and pet animals, he is chief player in an endless imbroglio of intrigue, swindle, cuckoldry—all of it funny, of course; haven’t we laughed at Molière?

“Darling
Walter,” his great friend Mrs. Wiggott has often said to him. “This could only happen to
you.”

He tells his stories in peaceful dining rooms, to a circle of loving, attentive faces. He is surrounded by the faces of women. Their eyes are fixed on his dotingly, but in homage to another man: a young lover killed in the 1914 war; an adored but faithless son. “Naughty Walter,” murmurs Mrs. Wiggott.
“Wicked
boy.” Walter must be wicked, for part of the memory of every vanished husband or lover or son is the print of his cruelty. Walter’s old friends are nursing bruised hearts. Mrs. Wiggott’s injuries span four husbands, counted on four arthritic fingers—the gambler, the dipsomaniac,
the dago, and poor Wiggott, who ate a good breakfast one morning and walked straight in front of a train. “None of my husbands was from my own walk of life,” Mrs. Wiggott has said to Walter. “I made such mistakes with men, trying to bring them up to my level. I’ve often thought, Walter, if only I had met
you
forty years ago!”

“Yes, indeed,” says Walter heartily, smoothing his hair.

They have lost their time sense in this easy climate; when Mrs. Wiggott was on the lookout for a second husband forty years ago, Walter was five.

“If your life isn’t exactly the way you want it to be by the time you are forty-five,” said Walter’s father, whom he admired, “not much point in continuing. You might as well hang yourself.” He also said, “Parenthood is sacred. Don’t go about creating children right and left”; this when Walter was twelve. Walter’s Irish grandmother said, “Don’t touch the maids,” which at least was practical. “I stick to the women who respect and admire me,” declared his godfather. He was a bachelor, a great diner-out, “What good is beauty to a boy?” Walter’s mother lamented. “I have such a plain little girl, poor little Eve. Couldn’t it have been shared?” “Nothing fades faster than the beauty of a boy.” Walter has read that, but cannot remember where.

A mosaic picture of Walter’s life early in the summer of his forty-fifth year would have shown him dead center, where nothing can seem more upsetting than a punctured tire or more thrilling than a sunny day. On his right is Angelo, the comic valet. Years ago, Angelo followed Walter through the streets of a shadeless, hideous town. He was begging for coins; that was their introduction. Now he is seventeen, and quick as a knife. In the mosaic image, Walter’s creation, he is indolent, capricious, more trouble than he is worth. Mme. Rossi,
the femme de ménage
, is made to smile. She is slovenly but good-tempered, she sings, her feet are at ease in decaying shoes. Walter puts it about that she is in love with a driver on the Monte Carlo bus. That is the role he has given her in his dinner-party stories. He has to say something about her to bring her to life. The cat, William of Orange, is in Angelo’s arms. As a cat, he is film star, prizefighter, and stubbornness itself; as a personality, he lives in a cloud of black thoughts. The figures make a balanced and nearly perfect design, supported by a frieze of pallida iris in mauve, purple, and white.