1

New York was a grey failure. Every morning the windows were sooted over with the sediment of the night before, so that a man would have to clean his window with a rag if he wanted to see the rest of the city with its stained brick and grimed windows. The skyscrapers darkened by exposure to the air. The city had not been what he had hoped, nor had employment among men dressed in grey and dark blue suits.

Frank Halleck, of Yale Law School’s class of ’48 without particular distinction and recently unemployed, was traveling to Europe because he almost had enough money to make the trip. Pesetas were cheap and Spain was sunny. After, he would return home, not to New York but through New York, heading west by Greyhound until he had crossed almost half the continent and reached his parents fading in their mansion with peeling paint. He would return after his funds had been exhausted, living on a last wire from Little Rock.

He wasn’t the first in his family to beg over the wire, though such had been the preserve of collateral and slightly disreputable branches of the family tree until the Crash. His family had survived Black Thursday although their fortune and stockbroker hadn’t. Their recovery had been hindered by the New Deal with its income taxes and estate duties, and Dewey had been promised like the Second Coming with tax reform. Christ hadn’t yet returned for His Millennium and there was still a Democrat in the White House, and Truman wasn’t saving anyone. 

Still, the Halleck’s were better situated than the run of their fellow men, holding to their mansion built by a patriarch who had carpetbagged to the Southland and spent the rest of his life drawing his blinds. Protection from Confederate deadenders who had never surrendered, who had lost their country at Appomattox and held onto their rifles.  

Frank had been thinking of lost countries and Lost Causes sailing third class on the Queen Mary to London. Third class which had been renamed tourist class without adding private lavatories, and he had taken advantage of the electric light over his bottom berth to read about the Second World War which was the recent past.

The war started at Pearl Harbor, which Frank remembered because every American did who was then alive and old enough to remember anything at all. He was in San Diego when Battleship Row sank and there were rumors the Japanese were landing along the West Coast. His father had been in the Navy then, because he had needed employment and had the college and connections to receive a commission as an officer. His father, like the rest of the country, had misjudged the chance of entering the war. Frank had seen little of his father from that day until VJ Day. His father had been in China for much of it, in a city Frank learned to find on the map called Chungking.

Frank himself had been medically unfit for service and tried lying his way into the infantry at eighteen and had contented himself with a job in a munitions plant during his summers to do his part. Had been better paid work than combat infantry, curiously enough, even as the workers on the line kept threatening to go on strike. Frank had received his only personal experience of physical violence after he’d spoken out against a strike vote, talking up their patriotic duty to support the men at the front and got a black eye and a cracked rib for his trouble. Had been told he was a goddamned Republican and he was but had also thought that he was an idealist.

Frank decided to keep going through college instead of working full-time at the plant after that experience and got work at a different factory making different components of the war. And he had read Ernie Pyle, which along with the newsreels and radio bulletins and the newspapers was how he experienced the war. Otherwise, but for his summer employment and brief career as an attempted strikebreaker and no one having new cars and the girls not having nylon stockings, his college years might have been lived by a member of the class of ’25 or ’40.

Frank had mourned Pyle’s death. He was one of those men who lived and died within his own era, the time he was suited for. Patton was too, and Gandhi who had taken a bullet after fasting, and so was Hitler even if no one except maybe the Germans was sad to see him go. But Pyle had made him think he understood something about the war and the GIs, and when he tried to explain this to Bill in the top berth who had been an officer Bill told him he didn’t know what he was talking about.

William “Bill” H. Calvert was travelling with him. Was a Georgia boy from someplace nobody had heard of. He was wolfish looking, with thick dark hair and permanent shadow when he didn’t let an unfashionable beard grow out and dark heavy eyebrows over dark brown eyes that were a tinge slanted and narrow. He wore sharply angled glasses with a brown and yellow pattern on the hinge. Chest hair poked over his open collar when he was dressed casually, and he had started school PT conditioned and now had a beer belly that was fast expanding, and in shorts his legs were so tanned as to look colored like a Red Indian.

The effect all together was like an ailing wolf.

Bill was near the top of his class of the same year as Frank and unlike Frank he had caught plenty of the war. Meant this wasn’t his first time in Europe and he’d always had an easy time picking up girls because they liked his VE medal and he’d had his shots so they didn’t catch anything second-hand from French girls who had needed dollars and chocolate bars.

“Girls got to be real hungry to give you a slice of it for a chocolate bar,” Bill told him, “I tried it on some of these local girls and they didn’t take to it at all.”

Bill had still done well for himself and Frank found he occasionally was with a girl who had once been Bill’s and wasn’t any longer. Some of the girls were from monied families and well bred, such as Frank might have known socially in the usual run of things, and that Bill had bedded them was a triumph of a peculiar sort of social climbing.  

Frank was a fourth, and the Halleck’s were a family that would keep a name going that long. The only time Bill ever mentioned his father was to tell Frank after a great many drinks that he’d never known the man but was told he looked and sounded a great deal like him. The GI Bill and a scholarship had paid for his Bachelor of Laws how ROTC and a scholarship had carried him through his college and made him an officer in the war. Had gone over to England on the Queen Mary when it was a troop ship. Frank supposed this trip must have been an improvement even if it was third class.

Bill told him one evening when they were in their berths that he had stopped spending on everything so he might have his fun on this trip.

“The girls over there might not still accept chocolate bars. Could get expensive.”  

Had given notice at his firm and had a better offer in his pocket waiting for him when he got back. Was already a man in demand. Certainly worked harder than Frank had, who wasn’t arguing which of them drove himself harder. 

That night he had been drinking and told Frank about his paternity, Bill also said that he knew was going to die a rich man, and Frank believed him.

They arrived in Southampton and were booked through to London. Didn’t stay there because it was too much like New York only without the skyscrapers and the choking fog was worse than New York’s smog, such that a man could hardly breathe when it was thick. They took the Cross Channel ferry from Dover to Calais. Bill had the wife of one of the British passengers and Frank looked out over the Channel and wondered what it must been like the night before Normandy going in the same direction.

2

Bill told him on the train to Paris that the bitch had never been with a circumcised man before.

“Shocked her when she saw it. Like it was missing something important.”

Were two other people in the compartment, a man and a woman who were well-dressed and appeared married. Frank hoped they didn’t understand English and Bill didn’t give a damn whether they did or not.

“Know what the bitch asked me? Asked me if I was a Jew.”

The train smelled like it was still under the Occupation. Dirty and repeatedly delayed at station. The lavatories were hygienic as outhouses. Most of the passengers were faded and hollowed, as though they had lost weight during the Occupation and the end of the war hadn’t brought them more calories a day. Paying for food with inflated francs that didn’t go far. Even the well-dressed couple, the bleeding edge of recovery, had rough times in the corners of their eyes, lines that they should have been too young for. A hungry expression they hadn’t gotten past, not had fat times long enough or fat enough to recover themselves.

Frank said the French looked like they hadn’t gotten past the war and Bill said the English did too, and they all deserved what they got. Bill was the only passenger who had gotten fat over the last few years.

“They might have been in the Resistance,” Frank said. He was thinking of Charles De Gaulle on the radio and bombs in open-top cars, cyclists with messenger bags.

“France is full of September Resisters,” Bill said.

“September?”

“Folks who joined the minute was obvious the Germans were going to lose and wanted to get their asses counted on the winning side.”

“I suppose not everyone did the courageous thing during the war.”

“Sure didn’t,” Bill said and then he got back to talking about his latest woman because Bill was always talking about his women. Women concerned him more than countries.

“Bet she wouldn’t have fucked me if I was a kike,” he continued.

“The English don’t seem so fond of them,” Frank said. “Not antisemitic how the Germans are, but not fond of them.”

“Can’t be like the Germans. They still got live Jews.”

“I think their problems in Palestine haven’t helped things. That hotel they blew up.”

Frank had read the papers that the British had smashed synagogue windows in England after the Zionists detonated a hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel had been converted to a military headquarters but still had civilians in it, in addition to the soldiers.

“They wanted Jerusalem,” Bill said, “even if they couldn’t keep it they got everything that went with Jerusalem.”

Israel had won its war of independence. Frank heard an activist speak during the Second World War on the need for a Jewish Homeland and talking about the Rights of Man and the Atlantic Charter. Heard another ask for donations for arms purchases. Applauded the first and donated a little to the second. Had thought he was supporting a lost cause, and was as surprised as the rest of the world when the Jews hoisted their flag and got as far as Jerusalem, even if they hadn’t ended the war with the Old City.

The train made its way, stopping intermittently at stations and sometimes mysteriously, and overheating as the day warmed. The heat produced a strong effect on the train and its passengers and lavatories. Frank was drenched like a summer heat wave at home, and the well-dressed couple were loosening what they could and the woman had a small fan and the man was dabbing at himself with a saturated rag. Bill returned to his favorite topic, sweat beginning to stain his shirt and his appearing not to notice. Frank wondered Bill simply ran hot and couldn’t notice subtle variations, or if he was too much acclimated to heat to take further notice of it.

3

They declared what little they had at the border and their luggage was searched by a customs inspector in a kepi. Bill passed a note that was hard currency and so made it over the Spanish border carrying a novel with dirty pictures he had bought in Montmartre while Frank had toured the Basilica. They had decided against staying in Barcelona because Frank didn’t much care for Gaudi or memories of the May Days and for Bill there were other girls in Madrid.

“I got enough Spanish to say what I like,” Bill said, “might all be whorehouse Mexican but that ain’t worth shit in a town the girls don’t speak any Spanish at all.”

Frank let a potential discussion of the difficulties of communicating with Catalan whores die of its own accord, as Bill moved on to talking about being stationed in California and crossing the border into Mexico which was how he had picked up his Spanish.

“That border ain’t no less corrupt than this one,” he said, “and it’s something about Spanish and Mexicans who are Spanish miscegenated with niggers and Indians, because once you go south of the border the world gets dirtier and less healthy and more fun.”

They did not reach Madrid on schedule, and instead stopped at a little town on the rail-line between the border and Madrid. They stopped there because the train showed no inclination to travel farther down the line. The porter explained in bad French and worse English that there was a problem with the train and further details were scarce and unintelligible. When Frank asked if they could get off the train, the porter jerked his head up and down.

“Leave train. Certainly.”

“Will we have time?”

“Plenty time. Have plenty time.”

Bill spoke with the porter in Spanish and carried a short conversation. Gave the porter a bill at the end of it and looked satisfied with himself. Porter left the compartment like he had an objective.

“What did you ask him,” Frank said.

“Asked if he could get our luggage and if this town’s got a brothel in it.”

“What did he say?”

“Be happy to get us our luggage, and that the girls are young and pretty.”

“Take it we’re getting off this train,” Frank said.

“This train ain’t moving for a good while and I ain’t waiting around for them to fix it.”

Bill had a predatory smile. Frank thought he must be getting itchy.

“What if the train gets moving again without us on it?”

“We’ll have our luggage, and ain’t so pricey to get another ticket.”

“I suppose if you’re willing to risk missing the train.”

“I sure am,” Bill said, and Frank gave up on their vague itinerary.

The station was lightly staffed and took negotiation and another exchange of notes to store their luggage. Visitors had dropped off since the International Brigades, although for all that got written about them mustn’t have been so many people involved. Couldn’t have been, considering who won the war, and them being in the Spanish State, whatever that official name meant, instead of the Spanish Soviet Republic. Was a portrait of Franco himself next to the arrivals and departures. El Caudillo was flyspecked and doing his best to appear regal, standing in for the king he was nominally committed to restoring to the throne. Historical oddity of a fascist holdout in a world made safe for democracy.

Man was waiting outside the station, smoking cigarettes and leaning against an aged Ford that must’ve been from before the civil war. Informal kind of taxicab. The cabbie seemed to regard what he was doing as a kind of dignified underemployment.

“Think we ought to get us some grub first,” Bill said, going towards the cabbie and taking Frank with him.

“We could walk,” Frank said, “it can’t be so far.”

“I already walked my ass across Europe,” Bill said, “and I’ve had enough fucking walking in my life. It’s something you get sick of.”

Bill told the cabbie to take them to a café. Drove with their windows down while the cabbie kept smoking cigarettes, and the dirt road kicked dust and the air was dry as it rolled in and mixed with cheap tobacco. The tobacco reminded Frank of folks back in Arkansas, but the air was different, without the humidity of the Southland where his family had settled, or the radiating concrete oven of New York in a heat wave.

Crossed a low stone bridge over a stream clear enough to see the brown and rocky bed. Women were by the stream, with clothes in baskets by them and others behind them on flat rocks to dry out in the sun. The women were hunched over the water and had white foam beneath them. Foam was being pushed down the stream and dissipated so there were only little lines of it across the face of the stream when it reached the bridge.

“My mamma did that,” Bill said, “washing with lye. Burnt the skin off her hands, using it as often and long as she did.”

“Mother had maids to do the wash,” Frank said.

“Course she did,” Bill said without looking at him. Watching the women and turning his head to keep watching them as they passed. “Suppose got the option of doing it yourself or putting it off on somebody else.”

“Doing what?”

“The thankless shit that keeps the world going.”

“At least in America, they might be able to buy a washer. Save up for it.”

“Sometimes ain’t sure if you an optimist or willfully blind,” Bill said.  

The dust kept kicking into the car and the women disappeared around a curve. There were mountains on the far horizon, well past the little town brown and approaching at the speed of an old Ford on a bad road.

4

The inside of the café was rickety tables and chairs that looked handmade and worn, and shadowy without electric light. The small windows didn’t allow much sun and what did come through was smothered by stained chintz wallpaper and dull across an irregular stone floor.

“Doubt this place stocks tequila,” Bill said, “ain’t the right kind of Mexicans for that.”

Frank said that he had never tried tequila.

“That don’t surprise me. Not your kind of experience. Tequilla’s good for whorehouses.”

Were the only patrons and seated themselves. Woman who might’ve been the owner took an order from Bill who sounded like he was used to ordering drinks in Spanish and might not have been the most desolate place he’d made such a request, or the most dispiriting kind of request. Asked for dos tequila and the woman said no and Bill ordered vino instead.

Frank imagined a goatskin bladder and instead was a dark green bottle without a cork and chipped wine glasses the woman put on the table in front of them. Was comparably modern, and perhaps more practical for untrained drinkers, and disappointing to Frank. Bill for his part didn’t mind the presentation and poured and downed a glass quick before commenting on it being better than could get in the States.

“Even bad European wine’s better than the good stuff back home.”

“I’m surprised that you know wine,” Frank said.  

“I know quality. I been in Europe before and I learned quality here.”

Bill poured himself another glass and took it as quick as the first and Frank wondered if that was how a person appreciated quality wine. He took his own first sip of the wine and was surprised at the taste of it, for the wine was indeed of quality even if the glass was sticky and left a print of his thumb smudged across the base like evidence in an investigation.

They continued drinking in a steady ratio and Bill ordered another bottle after the first was exhausted by calling for vino. The woman was a heavy-set woman in a dark dress and gave the impression of mourning. Bill said something to her in Spanish and she did not answer except to leave them with their drink.

“What did you ask her,” Frank said.

“Asked her where the whorehouse was,” Bill said and could smell the wine on his breath.

“I don’t think she’s the woman to ask.”

“No, she sure ain’t,” Bill said and filled another glass, “but wanted to ask her anyway.”

Had an expression that suited a dark room. Could be a mean drunk and had fought early in their tenure at law school and returned from weekends drinking with black eyes and bruised knuckles. Course, had been smart in how he had gone about fighting, hadn’t done it in town. Had taken the train to New York and fought in the anonymity of the city.

“I ain’t lesser than you,” Bill said.   

“I don’t think you are.”

“Course you do,” Bill continued. “All the folks who missed the war think that way of us that didn’t. Like we ain’t whole and y’all are.”

“I wanted to serve,” Frank said, “I volunteered and was rejected.”

“Don’t matter, it ain’t a question of intent. It’s a question of what actually occurred.”

“We have ended up in the same place.”

Their class had been obvious with members that had been through the war. Because the officers were better represented than the rank-and-file enlisted, were students who had possessed authority in a violent organization before going back to school. Men who had commanded tanks and infantry, led bombing raids, men who had been committed to organized killing before returning to civilian life and matriculating to learn the law.

“Ain’t arguing we ended up in the same place, only one of us had to go through a combat zone to get here. Boy,” he said, “know the shame of it?”

Frank shook his head and said no.

“The ones like me are the ones that got a future.”

“What do you mean?”

“We the ones of us went to Europe and came back to college. We going to buy houses and drink wine and listen to Hi-Fi jazz.”

“I didn’t think you cared for jazz.”

“I can’t fucking stand it, but I’m going to listen to it anyway. Because I’m one of those got a future.”

“And the others?”

“The other kind of folks are most of them. Went to Europe and came back to the dusty shitty little towns and farms they left for a processing center. Picked right back up how they were when they enlisted. Going to drink a lot of beer and marry their girlfriends when they stop being underage.”

Frank wondered if he was talking about somebody in particular. Back home wherever Bill was from. Place that made Little Rock look like Manhattan. Someone anonymous in an anonymous part of Georgia standing for a type in Bill’s head. The unknown returned soldier.

“They the folks ain’t going to be remembered even if they outnumber us who are boys graduated with the Class of ’48.”

“Why did you come here with me,” Frank asked, “come to Spain, I mean?”

“Wasn’t alone in Europe the last time I was here. Couldn’t make the trip on my own.”

Bill finished the bottle by pouring the rest into his mouth holding the bottle by the neck. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said they ought to go out.

“Want to go find a bitch I can mount up,” Bill said. “Keep on going until I run through the wad of bills in my back pocket. Get to Madrid and draw more cash and keep going.”

Bill looked like he had inherited the world and he probably had. Ailing and wolfish and drunk, and congruent between himself and the world.

5

Taxi waited for them. Bill told him to drive on to the brothel and the truck sputtered forward. Drove along the earth-colored street between low buildings of mudbrick and stone, monotonously white beneath clay-colored barrel tiled roofs. The café behind them had been of the same colors.

Street became paved and broad after a way, and the buildings became grander, some with marble and stone facades. A few appeared newer like a recent public works project and most were older and in need of restoration, dark from age and the details of the porticos chipped and the columns cracked. There was a square with an obelisk in its center and reminded Frank of courthouse squares in Arkansas with a war memorial in them commemorating defeat in a war in which his family had fought on the winning side. Were a handful of cars on the road, local notables parked in front of offices, their cars polished and flagrantly displayed.

Truck stopped to let men in suits walk past, and was in front of café that was clearly a café, as it had Café Central over the entrance in gothic type and tables with tablecloths over them in front and a single woman sitting there with a European style-coffee and an open newspaper. Frank noticed the paper was English-language, and on the table besides the coffee was another with a headline in Hebrew. The woman was of a well-preserved middle age with permanent-waved hair and a dark masculine shirt with sleeves and gloves that together might have been fashionable in the Twenties, American flappers only missing the cloth hat, and large dark glasses. Reminded Frank of Gene Tierney dropped somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be and making the best of it.

Bill wolf-whistled through the open window. She didn’t raise her head from the paper and Bill didn’t take offense. Action seemed automatic as scratching, and he did scratch himself as the truck started again.

“You think this town’s got a bullfight in it,” Bill asked. “Would be something, getting a slice of it and after seeing a bullfight in Spain in some town ain’t nobody heard of.”

“I’ve heard that in bullfights they kill with the cape. That it is all in the artistry and the misdirection of the matador,” Frank said.

“The lances probably have something to do with.” 

Truck turned down a side street that was still paved and must have once been fashionable. Homes that appeared to have money in them, and some that didn’t, sitting next to each other and grander than their mudbrick cousins in the poor sections of a poor town. Truck came to a stop and the driver indicated they were in the right place. Would have assumed that the building was a convent. Tall thick walls with narrow slit windows like archery slots, and an octagonal steeple with a cross on top. Had lost its protection to one side and abutted a row of buildings that were less distinctive, and on the other the wall extended with iron latticework on the top of it to gate something off.

Bill took his roll and Frank, who was poorer, took some coins out of his pocket and each gave the driver something as a tip. The coin said FRANCISCO FRANCO CAUDILLO DE ESPAŃA POR LA G. DE DIOS 1948 around a profile of Franco’s head without a bust or even much of a neck, and on the back was the country’s coat of arms. Truck left them as soon as they were out of it.

“Bet you going to say you ain’t coming in with me,” Bill said.

“You would be right,” Frank said.

“What you going to do instead of getting a slice of it?”

“I might have a coffee and bum a newspaper in English, and if not, I’ll watch the passing of time along the main street until we go back to the station and catch our train.”

“You fixing to wait all night.”

 “I’ll make do. Find a bed for myself.”

“You going to come back here when you figure out there ain’t no other beds.”

“You aren’t afraid,” Frank asked.

“Afraid of what?”

“The consequences for being with the women in there.”

“Ain’t like it used to be,” Bill said, “don’t got to worry about short arm inspections.”

“Short arm inspection?”

“Showing your pecker to an Army doctor to make sure it ain’t about to fall off.”

Bill sounded like he was free. Liberated from consequence. Frank thought that, ignoring that a knife in the stomach and across the throat also constituted a health concern, the deleterious consequence wasn’t the need to undergo the inspection as much the possibility of it falling off.

“And besides your health? Aren’t you worried about being thrown in a ditch?”

“I ain’t worried about that either,” Bill said and showed his teeth when he smiled, “they wouldn’t dare.”

With his stomach starting to hang over his waist, and his beard beginning to grow out, and red veins appearing in the whites of his eyes, and wine on his breath, looking generally like a self-satisfied wreck, Bill was foregone and invulnerable. He was a man who would destroy himself of his own volition, and not before the time of his choosing. Was arrogant in victory and turning to fat, and still carried victory with him as he walked. He reeked of victory, and of decay in victory.

“No,” Frank agreed, “I don’t believe they would.”

Turned and left Bill to his fun and started walking up the paved street towards the café. Smelled nightsoil from the buildings, and the smell reminded him of poor neighborhoods in Little Rock.

6

Frank passed by the same woman reading through the same paper. The café interior was fin de siècle, curved and gilt, tables on narrow curved legs and beveled mirrors in elaborate frames on the walls. Made the space appear larger and multiplied the few customers desultory over their cigarettes and strong coffee. Were men of advanced middle age, bad teeth and cigars, heavy jowls and blue eyes, thinning hair slicked back and grey, in suits and ties and dark shoes, the space entirely male and the woman outside excluded from their company. None of them, the woman included, appeared Latin, and the snatches of conversion between the tables sounded guttural and harsher than Spanish, the heavy consonantal sound of German.

The man behind the counter was dressed like the customers and a generation younger, with a scar across his cheek.

“Kafe,” Frank asked. Hoped the word was the same in German as Spanish, and only knew the Spanish because it was so close to the English.

“American,” the other man said.

Frank said he was. Felt himself in opposition to the man in front of him and the men behind him. Asked again for a coffee and this time in English. There was a coffee in front of him in a cup with a delicate design around the rim in a saucer with a matching design. Was told the price and paid and took a sip and was cold. Man’s lip flickered and caught the edge of the scar.

“This coffee is cold.”

The man shrugged and wasn’t looking overly perturbed. Frank knew he was being judged and that he was wobbling. Man in front of him looked like a Luger.

Took the coffee cup and saucer and said he would drink it outside. Were three tables outside and the middle one had the woman at it. Frank situated himself so that if he were to look up from his coffee, he would see her face. It was a good face, with some lines around her eyes and a pale complexion, without lipstick or makeup.

He watched the street and there was no traffic along it. The street was grand and sterile. The woman across from him was finished with the English paper and saw that it was The Times and was now on the Hebrew paper. Frank hadn’t touched his coffee and asked her if he could borrow the London paper. She looked up from what she was reading, had folded the paper and on the back page facing him was a picture of David Ben Gurion.

“Are you American,” she asked. She had no accent.

Frank said that he was. She put her paper down and smoothed a crease along the page like she was preparing herself. Her nails were unpainted and carefully trimmed. 

“Would you like to sit,” she said.

“I would,” and Frank took his coffee and sat on the chair opposite her. He put his cup and saucer next to hers.

“I saw you driving by, and assumed you and your friend were going to the bordello.” She lacked judgment in her voice. “As you are getting coffee here instead, I assume that wasn’t to your taste.”

Frank said that was true and she nodded like she was categorizing him, working on placing him. A visitor who was not interested in whores was different from a visitor, or from a visitor who was interested in them.

“Where are you from,” she asked.

“The States,” Frank said like he was repeating himself.

“I mean which state, which part of the many United States?”

“You wouldn’t know it,” Frank said, and when she waited for him to explain he said, “Arkansas,” and added apologetically, “but I was last in New York City.”

“You don’t have a drawl.”

“You know Arkansas?”

“Of course,” she said, “although I have never been there. But don’t they still teach the states in elementary school, along with the capitals and the presidents?”

“Are you an American,” Frank asked.

“No, though I almost was.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was born in Germany, but my family went to America when I was very young.”

Frank said she had very good English and she said that her name was Sarah, and he told Sarah his given name.

“I might have stayed in America, become naturalized and carried American papers,” Sarah continued.

“Why didn’t you?”

“A man,” Sarah said, “another Berliner Jew.”

Pulled a cigarette packet from her purse and a lighter with clean metallic lines and a blue streak like a stylized fender.

“German women don’t smoke,” she said like she was quoting someone.

“Then again,” she said after a long exhalation with the smoke rising in the air, “I am no longer German. By mutual agreement.”

“Mutual agreement?”

“Between myself and Hitler.”

“Were you,” Frank asked and paused, wondering how he might phrase a delicate question and settling on a kind of vague compromise, “in the war?”

She nodded and took another drag on her cigarette. The gesture reminded him of Bill, like being psychically and spiritually removed, part of them both left a few years behind and not caught up with the times.

“Is your husband, is he with you in Spain?”

She took another drag and placed the cigarette on the saucer, balanced so that the tip was over the table. The table had small scratches along it, and burns, and warps in the wood.

“He is not.”

“Why did you go back?”

“He was a musician with the Philharmonic. I followed him back to Berlin when he became homesick for the Fatherland and the beerhalls and cafes and the better music, and we stayed even after he lost his position. Our daughter was born in Berlin, and to surrender one’s home, that is a hard thing for the world to demand of someone.”

She paused and was like a break in a confession.

“It has been too long since I’ve spoken with an American. We have many Germans, but no Americans. You are not a race, by-and-large, that needs to escape.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is a town for people seeking refuge,” she said. “Myself and the Germans. We are a little island, refugees from the failed New Order. A future that died in the womb, with firebombing and T-34’s in the streets of Berlin.”

She sounded grimly satisfied. Doubted the Germans inside would sound the same. Nostalgic for the thousand-year Reich that lasted a dozen years, longing for the remaining nine-hundred-eighty-eight like the failed Millennium.

She raised her cup. There was a swastika stamped on the bottom of the cup. She finished the coffee and kept the cup raised and turned it around like she wanted to confirm what she already knew.

“They always give me this cup.”

She put the cup back on its saucer and Frank wondered if there was a twin symbol on his.

“That seems in poor taste,” Frank said.

“Everything after Zyklon B is a minor indignity.”

“What was that?”

“What they used to gas Jews,” Sarah said.

Frank knew there were dead Jews across Europe. Were dead Jews and they hadn’t stood out amongst the general dead. Hadn’t taken notice of the chemical involved. Hadn’t seemed so important. Then again, hadn’t been his people getting gassed with it.

“Is that true, about everything after being a minor indignity?”

“Probably not,” Sarah said, “though I like to imagine that it is. That there is enough tragedy a person and a people can experience, and having attained that degree of tragedy life becomes easy for being inured to tragedy, there not being enough pain for the difference to be noticeable and appreciable.”

Had the impression again of similarity to Bill. Like the two might’ve been companionate, for all the difference in age and sex and circumstances.

“You never get used to suffering?”

“You can be refined by it, but not indifferent to it. The soul has to suffer so that the soul might know itself.”

“Why?”          

“I do not know. I only that we must, and that the knowledge of such a terrible necessity is all that is allowed to us.”

They sat together and Sarah smoked and Frank did not touch his coffee.

“How did you get to Spain,” Frank asked.

“I was in Munich after the war ended. The capital of the movement ended the war in the American Zone. A change of regional and municipal government made Dachau into a displaced person camp. I went to the city because there are DPs who have not left the camps, and will never leave the camps even after they are closed. I am on my island but I am not one of those DPs. I gave English lessons in Munich. There was a demand. Women and men with different reasons to need English.”

She was disconnected and gave the sense that the postwar was all blurred together. She did not stumble over her words, and she was articulate in them, but indifferent to time and place and causality.

“Still, I couldn’t stay in Munich. Even if the whole city had been knocked down, I was still walking on Hitler’s streets, Adolf-Hitler-Straße even after the Americans changed the name.”

“But, why Spain,” Frank asked again.

“Because I am waiting on my visa to America to become an American again. If not there, for irregularities with my papers, then Israel. Make myself a Zionist after the Germans made me only a Jew. And there were ways to reach Spain from Germany.”

“But, these Germans, they aren’t Jews, they’re,” and Frank wasn’t quite sure he should articulate the end of the thought. Was sitting with a Jewish woman next to a café full of Nazis.

“Of course,” Sarah said. “Why else would they have needed to flee? They needed to escape justice, and I needed to escape the country that forced injustice upon me. In that, our needs were, however curiously, briefly aligned.”

“How, though, did you manage that?”

“I was in a city where I was not known, in a country filled with displaced persons, with deportees from the East, Germans with strange accents and Party memberships and homes that were now in Polish territory. One more Berliner accent did not stand out, among the great displacement of Germany in Year Zero.”

She pulled a set of papers out of her purse and put them on the table.

“One of my clients, a man learning English because it was the future, had a past himself, and connections from that past. Friends riding the lines to Spain. I had never told him I was a Jew, because that did not seem something to volunteer at the time because I needed clients and most were prejudiced against my race.”

The papers were stamped with an eagle carrying a swastika in its talons.  

“When I had enough saved, I gave my client these papers. They say that the woman listed on them is a member of the National Socialist Women’s League. I bought them from a woman who felt shame for her past that developed on V-E Day.”

She finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in the empty cup.

“After I arrived, I became Jewish again.”

She pushed the cup away from her and her sleeve raised in the gesture. Had numbers on her arm. She caught Frank looking at them.

“The only time since the end of the war that I have worn makeup. Applied on my arm. And I affected a fondness for opera gloves.”

“Are you afraid,” Frank asked. “Of them, in the café?”

“Hitler was permission,” Sarah said. “Permission to surrender themselves and be left as machine-men. Without Hitler, they have no capacity to act. Not even to kill another Jew.”  

7

Sarah told Frank she had to give an English lesson and he asked if he could see her again. She wrote down her address using a pencil reduced to a graphite stub on a napkin of rough paper.

“If you call the cabby and tell him to take you to the Jew, he won’t need the address.”

“Is it possible, could I come tonight?”

She looked at him steadily and evaluative.

“Of course,” she said after reaching a decision, “just give me some time before you do.”

Frank returned to the whorehouse after reaching the conclusion that he wasn’t going to find another place to stay. Found the bordello and knocked on the door. The woman behind it was an aged madame, wearing a silk dress like a nightgown. She had the remnants of hard living stamped on her.

“Bill amigo,” she said, and Frank answered sí senorita and hoped that was right.

She smiled and had blackened and missing teeth. Sugar and cigarettes, and poor hygiene. Bill was already a favorite customer. The entranceway was narrow and passed through the vestibule and behind it was a room like a lounge with dirty pictures on the walls and a portrait of the absent Infante. That the Infante was popularly known as Don Juan made it unclear whether this was staunch royalism or a visual pun.

Down a flight of stairs that were narrow and steeply irregular and old. Madame seemed to know them like a mountain goat with footings along a mountainside. Frank followed slower.

Bill was at the bottom of the stairs in a room with a long hallway and a series of rooms off the hall like cells. Room smelled like overripe sex and sweat, on top of something alien like incense. Only light came from street-level windows and candles that threw smoke. Greeted Frank like an old friend who had been gone too long. Told the madame something and the madame laughed and said gracias senor with feeling and left them. 

Bill was nude but for his glasses and was unselfconscious about his nudity. All over him was hairy.

“You’ve been enjoying yourself,” Frank said.

“Sure have.”

Was a naked girl splayed out on the couch like an odalisque beneath a surviving fresco and ruined framed paintings that had faded to insubstantiality. She was dark and looking at Bill like she didn’t want to see more of him but needed the money. Bill’s pants were folded over a chair and Bill reached in the back pocket and pulled out his roll. Was thinner but not so much as implied he had to slow down. Peeled off a note with one hand while he scratched with the other. Offered the note to Frank.

“Why don’t you have that girl?”

“You’ve had her.”

“Filled the bitch up, and felt real good.”  

“I think I might pass on the offer,” Frank said.

Bill scratched at himself as he considered the girl.

“Might be I’ve got flees. I always was told I’m a dog,” Bill said.  

“Might be more of a wolf and might not be flees.”

“Well, least I came by them having some fun and don’t have to risk burning my pecker off with turpentine and matches to get rid of them.”

“That a war story, too?”

“Plenty of VD stories came out of the war, not as though any of the papers would carry them. Plenty of GIs, first thing they did on getting back was give their wives the clap. They all had a hell of a time explaining how they’d gone and picked it up. Telling the little woman that hubby had spent some of their time apart in a French brothel and now she’s going to need some shots ain’t very Hollywood. Ain’t in romance novels either, in those all the hookers got hearts of gold and ain’t syphilitic and rotting on the inside. But, ain’t as though the prize for good behavior is getting to live forever.”  

Bill’s expression was lewd as a cartoon wolf.   

“You ought to get you a girl before the Kraut does,” Bill said.

“The Kraut?”

“We sharing this bordello with a German,” Bill said.

8

The German was fat with jowls and capped teeth, and smoked cigars. A small mole near the nose and a high forehead, and his face flushed and blue eyes glassy. Was wearing an unsettlingly new suit. Together he looked like a prosperous middle-aged burgher with grey at his temples and blood on his hands. German greeted Bill like they were familiar with each other. Introduced himself to Frank in English as Herr Mann.

“I am in the import and export trade,” Mann said, “I did business in America before the war.”

Frank asked if he was related to the author Thomas Mann who lived in Los Angeles.

“No, I do not believe,” he said and added, “common enough name.”

Mann took off his suit and handed it to the madame to hang. Kept on his shorts and so was more modest than Bill. They had similar builds, how they wore their weight. Had an SS blood tattoo on his arm and an elaborate tattoo of a musical score across his back. Frank had seen photos of the former in newspapers reporting on guilty men who had tried to go into hiding in plain sight among the other apolitical Germans before being betrayed by their tattoos.

“I tell everyone will listen,” Mann said to Frank, “sex is good for the glands. I tell them, the glands are what makes the man different from the woman, from the eunuch, the man missing the glands.”

“Ain’t that sensible,” Bill said, “I ought to have thought of that myself.”

“This man,” Mann said, “have the glands. Why despite politics we do not fight.”

“That and the Unconditional Surrender,” Bill said.

“The death of my country, and so we can be friendly here,” Mann said. “Death of my country and our glands, on such things friendship are made.”

“You want wine, I got a half bottle in my girl’s room,” Bill said.

“Generous man,” followed by a series of Danke Schön’s as Bill walked without unsteadiness to the room and returned with the bottle.

“Ain’t got glasses, so you got to drink straight from the bottle.”

Handed him the bottle and Mann toasted him by raising it in the air. Used his left hand and showed the tattoo on his arm.

“You are not what kill me.” Took a deep gulp and handed it off to Bill, who did the same. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and Mann hadn’t, had a line down his mouth and indifferent to it.

“What’s that one along your back,” Frank asked.

“It is Ode to Joy. You know piece?”

Mann began humming it without giving time to answer. Frank didn’t know it besides a vague melody, and Bill started humming along.

“You do know,” Mann said and Bill nodded without losing the melody.

“The most beautiful music. German music,” Mann continued.

“Lady back home,” Bill said after the crescendo, “played church organ and liked that sort of music. Taught it to me.”

“You play the organ?”

“Used to,” Bill said, “would have to pick it back up. Learned me the piano too, girls used to like hearing me play.”

“But,” Frank asked, sitting and situated so he could see the notes of the score along Mann’s back, fine lines and careful notes, “how did you get a tattoo with that kind of work?”

Mann was standing proud because for being in a place full of girls for sale he was the object of attention, a masculine kind of pride in the body. Asked for the bottle and took another swig and more dripped down the side of his mouth.

“I had done in Samoa, between the wars. No longer German but had connections there.

During the hungry years, hunger took me to Pacific. All had to remind self of Germany, the true strong Germany, was the records of our music played on the gramophone. One night was listening to this piece lying under the mosquito net, other side of the world from what was left of the Fatherland, and listening to the music I realize great thing.”

“What’d you realize,” Bill asked after Mann poured more wine down his gullet.

“Realize,” Mann said with his back unbent and his stomach heavy from drinking, “that God is a German.”

Bill whistled at that. Wasn’t an unbelieving kind of whistle.

“Knew would forget,” Mann said, “men learn something of God always forget. The natives, they tattoo each other like savages. Use long wood needles. I consider, lying under the mosquito net in heat such as do not have even here, the making of design would remind me, so long and painful could not forget. Fix into my mind. The tattooist had never seen a musical score before. Copy exact. So exact, during time in the hospital after wounded in the East, nurse played the piece on a piano by reading off my back. That is virtue of ignorance, and from savage’s ignorance have Beethoven and God across my back.”

“That work,” Bill asked, “you never forget what you figured out?”

“Even during the worst of the war, even on hearing the death of the Fuhrer, I keep what I learned that night in Samoa during first exile from the Fatherland. Never have I waivered in the knowledge. Carry it with me.”

Mann had a bleary kind of beatific expression. Frank had never heard a man so confident in his own salvation.

9

“You sure you ain’t interested in a woman,” Bill asked Frank like he was trying to take care of a slower and inexperienced friend in need. Mann had gone back to a girl and Bill was planning on doubling her with him. “I’ll pay for one all to yousrself and will get you a bed and company for the night.”

“I’m actually going to meet a woman,” Frank said, “I met her at the café.”

Bill raised a heavy eyebrow and whistled low.

“You a dog too,” he said. “She good looking?”

“She is, like a film star who might have been a pinup during the war.”

“Blonde and big tits?”

“No, brunette and lithe.”

“Then she ain’t a pinup,” Bill said. “You sure you ain’t interested in one here? Or taking a slice out of Mann’s before I get to her?”

Frank felt sorry for the girl and wondered if she’d tell them apart in the dark. Were of similar builds, despite their differences of nationality and age, and suspected they were similar in how they treated a girl in bed.

“Why are you so friendly with him?”

“War’s over.”

“Most of us aren’t so quick to forgive.”

Bill’s face was shadowed in the light, and his beard was growing out. His eyes with their slight squint might have been from the Asiatic steppe, wearing glasses whose pattern was dark and splotchy in the light. Was like a wolf on two legs.

“We both of a race that fought hard and lost,” Bill said.

“He murdered Jews.”

“I didn’t fight to save them.”

“He is still a murderer.”

“War’s over and it ain’t my place to hang him in peacetime.”

“Not the same as having to forgive so quickly.”

“I’ve killed plenty of Nazis. Certainly killed more than you have. Fuck, boys like me killed more Nazis than boys like you.”

“How do you mean,” Frank asked.

“Boys might’ve been in the Klan killed more of them than boys would wring their hands worrying about matters of conscience.” Bill smiled and was a mean smile with sharp teeth and Frank felt sorry for that girl, because she was going to spend the night with two men could draw blood. “Boys would have bitched about gassed Jews and lynched niggers.”

“Didn’t think you were in the Klan,” Frank said, and wondered why he’d thought that. Might’ve been Harvard and might’ve been the Silver Star.

“Didn’t feel like being bitched out over it.”

Started to turn on bare feet, and then stopped, body in half-profile. Still had a developed chest, even over an expanding paunch.

“Know something,” Bill asked, like he wanted to let Frank know he knew more and was going to share it with him.

“What?”

“You get past the rictus, Death is smiling. Like that German, bad teeth and cigars, and bringing music with him.”

“What kind of music,” Frank asked.

“Sometimes sounds like artillery fire, sometimes like a breaking neck, sometimes like gasping for air, and sometimes like the Ode to Joy.”

10

Taxi driver, after he came out of one of the rooms, said “the Jew lady” when Frank told him the address. Sarah was in a nightgown when she opened the door to him. Her home was a transient space, bare walls and cheap furniture, a home with a suitcase only half-unpacked in the bedroom and her documents close at hand. She was wearing a pearl necklace and a diamond ring and hadn’t been wearing either earlier in the day. Surprised Frank by knowing who Mann was.

“All the Germans in Spain know his real name, and I was German long enough to know him.”

“You’ve met him?”

“I know, I suppose I’ll call him Herr Mann, quite well.”

Frank had said she sounded fond of him and Sarah had answered that she had a working relationship with him.

“We are not on bad terms, in our mutual exile.”

“He was in the SS. He has a blood tattoo on his arm.”

 “We both have tattoos on our arms.”

Her tone communicated her position that the tattoo from being a Jew in a camp and the tattoo from being the man who put Jews in camps linked them close enough to entitle her to judgment, and excluded Frank with his unmarked arm.

“Cruel way of looking at things,” Frank said.

“Cruelty binds the world together.”

“I’d like to imagine there’s love and kindness in it, too,” Frank said.

Sarah adjusted the ring on her finger. Couldn’t have been the ring her husband had given her. Went to fund the war effort directed against her people.

“That is a very Christian way of considering the world,” she said.

“I’m a Christian,” Frank said.

“And I am not. Nor were my husband and my daughter. Why they are dead and why I am in Spain.”  

“Why are you smiling,” Frank asked. Couldn’t help asking.

“Would you prefer that I cry?”

She laughed after saying that and Frank wondered if Bill was built the same way, only choosing screwing instead of smiling.

“No,” Frank said, “that’s not what I mean, but, I suppose it would be, suitable isn’t the right word but it is the word for it, too.”

She was smiling now wide. She was beautiful. Knew he’d come to see her because she was beautiful and had seen something, because he had come to Spain to see something.

“I have cried,” she said. “Now I am left living, and it is better to live smiling.”

“Is that what you’ve learned, for having cried,” Frank asked.

“I learned it from dying to myself in a camp, among the dead, and for being reborn at liberation.”

Frank could see her now, among the dead and the dying. She had died to herself and found something among mass graves and gas chambers and been released before the next stage which was dying entirely.

“Is that what you’ve learned, for having died to yourself in a camp, among the dead, and for being reborn at liberation?”

“Do not ask for the secrets taken from the land of the dead,” Sarah said, like she was quoting something older than herself and older than God. What else could the camps have been, but the land of the dead. She was still smiling.

“Why did you invite me, if not to tell me them?”

“Perhaps the company of an innocent man,” Sarah said, “for I do not know many of them.”

Her bust looked like something found in a ruined Oriental palace. Her face and hair, and the pearls around her neck. The archaic smile on her face, how the Greeks showed a statue was of one numbered among the living.

 “What are you seeking in Spain,” she asked.

“To be stripped bare and descend to the center of things. To reach the nadir of my life and century, and from there to rise.”

“Auschwitz was the nadir of this century.”

Frank knew of Auschwitz. It had been in those books he had read on the shop coming to Europe. Never dwelled on, a paragraph here and another there, and pictures from the trials of the surviving German leadership, of living Jews reduced to skeletons and others no thinner when exhumed from mass graves. Auschwitz was the number on her arm. Frank could hear a sound like dancing, like artillery fire. Like chanting in a dead language, repetitive and droning and terrible. His voice followed the rhythms of it, invocatory and formal.

“Please tell me what you have learned.”

Sarah was still smiling when she replied.

“I have learned that the descent to hell is easy, and the same from every starting place.”

Sarah poured him Spanish wine, and Frank drank too much of it, and Sarah told him of her life and he told her of his, and he slept in the room she received him in, and dreamed of a great slope to the world that led down to hell, and over the gates read Arbeit Macht Frei.

11

Frank woke to the Ode to Joy. It was from a record player in Sarah’s bedroom. The recording was tinny and scratched. Frank knew Bill and Mann were in the bedroom with the music and Sarah before he heard their voices, knew it in the fraction of a second before he was returned fully to consciousness. As though he brought the camp with him on waking, and Bill and Mann and Sarah and the music along with it.

Bill was the first out of the bedroom and he looked how he had the night before, more bloodshot for lack of sleep and additional drinks but not unlike himself. Was still nude and scratching himself, and Frank knew that this was how he’d remember Bill.

“Boy, you missed yourself an opportunity,” Bill said and didn’t have an ounce of malice in his voice.

“How did you get here,” Frank asked.

Were interrupted by Sarah standing in the doorway nude but for her pearls and the ring on her finger. She was smiling and as unembarrassed as Bill, who turned to her and looked her over. There were bruises along her stomach and down her sides and arms, and her lips and cheeks were red and irritated from stubble.

“Both of my Americans,” Sarah said.

Mann called to her from the bedroom. She answered him in German, then told Bill there was time to get coffee before their train left for Madrid.

“Think we got time to do something else,” Bill said.

“Of course,” Sarah said, “and coffee afterward. Show off my American friends to the Germans.”

“Besides the one in there.”

Sarah laughed at that and said there were other Germans in Spain and they could use a reminder that America was in Europe now. Bill said he’d be glad to oblige and humble beaten men and Sarah said she didn’t doubt that at all and shut the door.

“Boy,” he said, turning back to Frank “you really ought to have fucked that woman.”

Sounded appreciative of her and sorry for Frank. Like it was the great missed opportunity of Frank’s life, determinative of all the misfortune that would come after. Frank repeated his question. Bill kept scratching while he answered.

“Mann told me he knew a woman would put the one we was splitting to shame.”

“Did the cabby bring you?”

“Didn’t need him. Mann knew the way, and that lady opened right up when he called for her. Saw me with him and she didn’t bat an eye.”

“When did you come?”

“That ain’t a polite question,” Bill said, enjoying his own dirty joke, “but if you mean when did me and Mann get here, was after you’d poured yourself into that couch.”

Frank realized he had no headache, no trace of hangover. However much he had drunk before he had become insensible, had passed through him and when he had fully woken, he had woken clean.     

The music was still playing and could hear Mann and Sarah speaking, voices muffled and in their shared German. The shared language of the killer and the victim, and perhaps that was why the Israelis were trying to bring back Hebrew, so that the Jews might have a language only to themselves. Even Yiddish was only how Jews spoke German, and so tied to the race that had put Jews on cattle cars to the Ostland, the General Government.

Wondered how long Sarah would speak German, after she left Spain. If she would die muttering German on her deathbed, becoming German again as she approached the end, or if the intervening years would supplant German with her English that was almost as native to her, or having been refashioned by Israel her dying words would be in the language of the Old Testament recreated so that she might describe telephones and tanks and Knesset elections in the language of Elohim. For Mann, there was no question he would die German, the only question being exiled or returned. For the same historical reason there was no question Mann would be German when he died, Frank was uncertain what Sarah would be.

“Don’t think this lady’s got indoor plumbing,” Bill said. “Come here to go back to my childhood, morning toilet’s a washstand with a pitcher of water on it and a chamber pot.”

“I suppose you aren’t so out of practice as to mix them up,” Frank said.

“Naw, I ain’t, and still’s better hygiene than my time in the service.”

Bill took a bottle of wine from the kitchen and helped himself.

“You hear about boys in trenches having to shit in their helmets and pitch the mess over the side?”

“I never heard of that,” Frank said.

“Another sort of thing doesn’t get reported,” Bill said.

“Imagine this isn’t, either.”

“Splitting a woman with a German officer probably wouldn’t make a good war story,” Bill said like he was thinking on it. “Though might be good for a dirty-minded men’s magazine.”

The record had turned over and the music was still playing, piece started over. Bill went back into the bedroom with the bottle of wine and Frank washed himself using a basin in the kitchen.

12

Sarah told Frank to wait. Bill put on clothes that smelled like candle smoke and sex, and Mann had walked around naked to the waist but for suspenders, showing off his tattoos, before putting on a shirt that was fresh and well-tailored and not what he had worn the evening before.

Hadn’t spoken much to Frank but had a running conversation in English with Bill and another in German with Sarah. Talking about going into business with Bill.

“A man in New York could go far for knowing a man in Europe,” he said. “My connection in Europe and your connection in America.”

Bill said they could discuss that in the train or Madrid, and added, “I ain’t doing business when I’m still more than a little drunk, at least when I ain’t had coffee yet, but it ain’t for lack of interest.” 

“Commerce builds friendship between nations,” Mann said, like he was quoting a slogan from a peace organization between the wars or a recent statement from the United Nations with a jovial irony. “If commerce is all that is left to us, should embrace.”

Imagined the conversation with Sarah was on a different theme, though Mann seemed happy with what she was saying. Sarah left to change the record to a different piece of German music to play them out and to change. Bill told Frank while she was making the change that he had one more chance to make it with her.

“Though I might have wore her out,” Bill said. “Thought I was rough on a bitch but how that German handles them, I come out like Southern gentility.”

“She isn’t a bitch,” Frank said.

“Sure she is,” Bill said.

Sarah walked out of her bedroom and out of the interwar years, with her pearls and her ring. Bill and Mann left as bosom companions, both smashed and running on alcoholic fumes. Mann was talking to Bill about the promise the future held, the future occupying both sides of the Atlantic and crossing between them.

“Herr Mann was quick to see that the future is American,” Sarah said after they left, “even if he convinces himself that it will be in partnership with Germany.”

“Suppose that it keeps him going,” Frank said.

“You are wondering about Herr Mann,” Sarah asked.

“I am.”

“I said that I knew him well.”

“I didn’t catch your meaning.”

Sarah laughed at that.

“I might have made myself more precisely understood.”

Frank asked a question he knew the answer to.

“You’ve been with him, before?”

Tried keeping the judgement out of his voice and didn’t succeed. Sounded prim as a spinster, and lacking a sense of justice that should’ve gone with the circumstances. Like she was a scalawag to her race, how the Southerners had assisted his own great-grandfather had been, defecting from the brotherhood of defeated men and much to his descendent benefit.

“Whenever that train breaks down at our station, I expect I will see him again,” Sarah said. “I had expected to have finished with him before you arrived, but your friend has an effect on him. Both delayed him and made him more enthusiastic.”

“How often does the train break down?”

“Often enough that I believe he bribes the conductor. Particularly, given the train never leaves before his return to the station. I’m inclined to believe that he has bent the train schedule around his glands.”

“He holds the entire train up so that he can be with you and leave the next day?”

“No less excessive than invading Russia, and no less romantic, in its fashion.”

“What would you have done if I had been awake when he arrived?”

“I would have let him in and told him to wait for me in the bedroom. Continued my conversation with you, before going in with him.”

“Is he how you reached Spain,” Frank asked.

“He is in imports and exports, people as well as goods. He gave me this ring and my passage to Spain, and if not for the number on my arm, I might have remained German and kept our engagement.”

“You hadn’t,” and Frank stopped out of modesty, out of place and perhaps misplaced considering the previous day and night.

“We had, but I kept on my opera gloves. I told him my hands were badly burnt. He even put the ring on over the glove.”

“He killed Jews,” Frank said.

“He killed my husband and my daughter,” she said. “Or a man identical to him, and I considered killing him to avenge them.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wanted to survive, and he was a man who would survive.”

“Is it survival above all else,” Frank asked.

“You have not been hungry,” Sarah said. “Righteous men aren’t found on an empty stomach. And you have not been through wartime.”

“I missed the war,” Frank said, “but there are those who went through the war and still believe in justice.”

“Perhaps, and perhaps they discovered justice after it was over, or the men above them knew justice and the men fighting were simply trying to survive. How those of us in the camps were, those who weren’t gassed on the way in. Perhaps even the Israelis will take German money and forgive, or at least open an embassy, when the time comes.”

“He bruised you.”

“That was mostly the work of Herr Mann,” she said. “I suspect he considers killing me and bruises are as far as he will go.”

“He doesn’t have permission to kill you,” Frank said.

“No, he doesn’t, and he is still a prisoner of his glands.”

“Bill is too.”

“Your friend is a man that enjoys sex. Herr Mann does as well, and whether he hoped to humiliate me or to show himself off to an American, I enjoyed them both as well. We are only liberated in our minds, not in our bodies.”

“Liberated?”

Sarah nodded her head.

“Would you like to hear how the world will end?”

“Do you know that?”

“It is what I learned in the camps.”

“Tell me.”

“Before the camp, I believed the world was bound together by love. In the camp, I learned that those bonds were weak, and that the strong bonds tying the world together were cruelty.”

“That is what you told me last night.”

“It is, and I left you to sleep on that first recognition. The second arises from the first. For

the world is held together by two invisible bonds. The strong bonds of cruelty and the weak bonds of love. When cruelty dissolves the world will know only love before those bonds too fray and the universe will annihilate itself in love. That is the coming of the Messiah, the redemption and the dissolution of the world.”

“You saw the Messiah,” Frank asked.

“I did,” Sarah said.

“What did he look like?”

“He was a soldier that looked like Bill.”

Frank saw the world dissolving in white and perfect light. Saw Sarah dissolving in it, and Bill and Mann, and the Ode to Joy playing as the world ended in a millennium of love.

Final

Sarah walked with Frank to the café, where Bill and Mann had seated themselves at her table outside. Sarah seated herself where she had the day before. Mann brought them coffees and continued his conversation with Bill, and Sarah spoke some German to Mann and some English to Bill. She pulled the paper in Hebrew from her purse and continued reading it, the same picture of Ben Gurion and Frank wondered how long and carefully she read each issue. She had taken off her pearls and her ring before leaving, and all she had was her dress and the Gene Tierney sunglasses, and her bruised and tattooed arms.

Bill gave her a slip of paper and she opened it. Was Bill’s address in New York and a telephone number. She read the slip several times like she was memorizing it, such that even if she lost it, she could write it down again. She said thank you to Bill and put the slip in her purse. Frank wondered if she would follow him to New York, and if he would keep her if she did.

Mann checked his watch and said it was time to go.

“Have our train,” Mann said, and sounded knowing. Cabbie appeared like he had been sent for. Mann gave Sarah a whistle and Bill said he’d be seeing her. Frank said goodbye to her, knowing that, regardless of whether she made it to America, she would never step foot in Little Rock. She went back to reading her paper.

]Bill and Frank retrieved their luggage, and the framed photo of Franco was still in its place and would be however long the Spanish State lasted. Mann told Bill where he could be found in Madrid.

“I am happy to introduce you to other girls,” Mann said, “none so good as our mutual friend, but still many women in Madrid. Good for glands, but none so good as her. She is good for a man.”

“We are men, ain’t we,” Bill said, and with that they separated. Bill and Frank settled into their compartment.

“Are you going to work with him,” Frank asked.

“If the money’s right and I don’t got to risk my neck bringing Nazis into the States.”

“Suppose he might have legitimate interests.”

“Like enough they all do,” Bill said, like he was talking about the whole German race.

Bill pulled out a cigarette and lit a match on the heel of his boot as the train pulled out of the station. Mann hadn’t missed his train.

They began the final leg of their trip together. Would leave for America separately, and the paths of their lives would continue on their divergent tracks.

“Do you ever think that the world ended a long time ago and we’re just waiting to find out,” Frank asked.

Question had concerned him for some time, without his knowing that was how to express it. Tied into Sarah, who knew the world was going to end in love and cruelty, and Bill who was more alike to her than he was to Frank. Bill answered:

“For plenty of folks, world ended a long time ago and they fucking know it and are stuck waiting for the rest of us to catch up with them.”

Bill worked on his cigarette and adjusted his watch and gave the impression he was thinking about the woman reading her Hebrew paper at the Café Central, and whether he’d get a wire from her.

“I could get her a visa,” Bill said. “She wanted one, half the bastards at the embassy like enough from our alma mater.”

“She had an effect on you,” Frank said.

“Goddamn, you ought’ve had her,” he said, and smoked his cigarette without adding a lewd observation or a dirty joke. Scratching himself intermittently and with his bloodshot eyes, looked like a hound dog with his tail between his legs, and Frank wondered if Bill had ever been in love before.

“I learned something from her,” Frank said, “about the war. About what I missed, and about the way the world ends.”

He was smiling for he knew the world would end in love, and Bill working on his cigarette started smiling too. His dark eyes were small and slanted behind the glasses that matched them and his beard had grown out, and his expression was wolfish again.

“Sure, boy,” Bill said and knew was the last time the subject would be raised between them, “but you would have learned plenty and had more fun if you’d had her.”  

Their train continued to Madrid, the Madrid of Velázquez and Falangists, besieged Republicans and Baroque palaces, the unwilling capital of the Spanish State and a memorial to an aborted future. Bill who had inherited the future and would return to it, a Georgia boy made good in sooty and grey and Futurist New York, and Frank who would return to the country that was his home and alien to him, and forever living in the ante bellum and the aftermath of the surrender.