Another metallic rap for attention. He’s got to stop that! Can’t he tell that I’ve just had all my skin surgically removed? I think that must be why I hurt so much. Not having skin. But maybe it didn’t happen surgically. No, I think maybe I was born that way. Think I’ll write myself up in The Journal of the American Medical Association, and then Kopelman and all the others will understand, once and for all, about this birth defect of mine which permits exposed tissue to remain at the mercy of merciless elements.
“The train for Paris leaves in twenty-five minutes, fraulein.” The cop dropped a hefty ring of keys from one hand to the other. “I will personally take you to the railroad station if you promise to behave decently.”
I heard myself laughing, but it wasn’t anything like the inspired laughter that I once shared with Ruth and Anton and later with Roger. My laugh sounded unnatural, as though it had been recorded many years earlier, and was now being replayed on an ancient gramophone.
I raised myself from the bench to walk with inordinate slowness to where the bars separated us. “You have no right to speak to me of decency,” I told him in a voice that resembled a hoarse whisper. “No right at all, for I am a Jew and you ... you’re only a German.”
30
AS THE TRAIN took a wide-angled, around-the-bend turn, I caught my first returning glimpse of Paris. On the other side of the darkness, it shone like an unclaimed treasure. Paris glitters and Göttingen doesn’t. Even so, that isn’t the essential difference between the two cities.
Because for all of Paris’s glamor it’s still a city that doesn’t spend a lot of time fooling around with pretend. So that’s it! The quality that I’ve admired both in this city and in Roger. The city and the man both have the strength to take life on an “as is” basis.
Much more “as is” strength here than in Jenkinsville, where people pull the gospel so tight around themselves that they squeeze out life along with the devil.
While you, Göttingen, with your feudal architecture, are no better. Medieval towers and ancient forts encouraged and nurtured my belief in all those things, which I see now, could never be. At first, I believed that I had at last found a place where a damsel’s distress would be invariably short-lived and princesses and paupers would not only be expected to prevail, but live happily ever after.
At Gare St. Lazare, my seat mate Raoul, a lawyer on his way back home to Madrid, carried both my suitcases out of the station and onto the sidewalk. Actually, it was Raoul’s second very needed favor to me. And I’m pretty certain that he didn’t realize it because if you wear good clothes, nobody would ever guess you could be going hungry.
Shortly after leaving Göttingen my ulcer gnawed a sharp reminder to put food into my stomach and as much as I wanted to soothe the angry little beast, I knew that I had enough money for cab fare and I maybe had enough money for a dining car dinner, but not for both. Definitely not for both!
As I with growing concern considered my dwindling choices, a tall man of at least forty, with solid gold cufflinks and a perfectly enormous Adam’s apple, appeared before me to ask (in French yet!) if the seat next to me were taken. I must have smiled very welcomingly because his words came through to me as clearly as if he were saying, “Dinner will soon be served.”
And I might have continued smiling too for many more moments than necessary because that’s when it struck me that in spite of Göttingen and my inability (or unwillingness) to even think about what happened there, my dedication to my own personal survival seemed pretty much intact.
While the taxi waited (and I worried that the meter might be running), Raoul with maddening leisure placed his vellum calling card in my hand and offered me the back of another to write my own address. With considerable reluctance, I wrote: Patty Bergen, Jenkinsville, Arkansas, U.S.A. Then we shook hands and said our goodbyes.
As the cab wound adroitly through the traffic, I wondered at the size of the scandal if this oversized, overaged Spaniard should ever decide to present himself in my hometown.
At number 39 Place St. Sulpice, I told the driver to pull over in front of the still lively Café Jacques because just three flights up is (has got to be) home. The fare was 220 francs. I slipped the last of my money—three 100 franc notes—out of my wallet. Told the driver to kindly carry my luggage up to the top of the stairs and in my last act of solvency told him to keep the change.
As I climbed the stairs, one fatigued foot following another, the cabby passed me on his fast trot back down with a smile, a wave, and a “Bonsoir, mademoiselle.”
When I reached the paint-chipped door to our—to Roger’s —place, I stood, trying to breathe in the air that would inflate my rapidly deflating supply of courage. And maybe even in shorter supply than courage was conviction. I didn’t know what to show Roger, my love or my anger.
Who gave him the right to hurl those terrible accusations at me? I’d like to give him one good sudden swift kick and then I would no longer be angry with him. I would have made him suffer at least a little of what he had made me suffer. We would call it a draw. Then who knows, we might be able to love to the finish.
I wanted to be at peace with Roger again and, even more urgently than that, I had to rest. And it was for that reason that I knocked.
That’s when I heard a sound (a feminine-gender sound of lovemaking interrupted?) on the other side of the door. I wondered if my spent body could make it unseen down the steps without having to come face-to-face with either of them. Damn her! Damn him! And damn the French! That’s all they ever do. That’s all they ever think of!
Suddenly I conceived a very clear picture of just what it is that French Catholics whisper to their priests once inside those mysterious closet-like cubicles. “Tell me, Father, is the church positive, I mean really positive about the existence of sex in the afterlife?”
The door opened a wedge and Roger, not surprisingly, seemed surprised. Even so, he invited me in. What a really stupid thing to do.
“Thanks, anyway! But I don’t want to meet her. It was only that I happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d say hello. But I’m already late for an appointment, so hello and goodbye,” I heard myself say, while wondering where it is that I could possibly find to go.
He wore a mocking half-smile on his lips. “Meet her?” He swung the door back, allowing a fully unobstructed view of the nobody-there interior.
“You are hearing with jealous ears, my friend.”
“Maybe,” I said, not allowing myself to become completely convinced until I saw a single glass of well-sipped burgundy on the table. “But it is you, mon ami, who speaks with a cruel and jealous tongue.”
“Yes, well, perhaps, but I deserved better treatment than you dispensed, dear lady. Every day I came to the hospital, yes? I count the days until we can be together again. Yes, it’s true. I’m like a crazy man counting the days. And you! What is it you do? At the last moment and under the most direct questioning, you finally admit that you’re not coming home. That you never had any intention—”
“Roger, it wasn’t nearly as premeditated as you’re trying to make it sound. Olivia Marcou made me realize that I simply could not leave this continent without doing what it was that I came here to do. I had to go. My obsession demanded it!”
“Well, I was taught that common courtesy demands that even a hotel reservation be cancelled, but did you?”
“No, but I wish that I had. I’m tired. I’m sorry, but I’m so very tired.”
Roger ceased the enumeration of my transgressions to look at me with unguarded vision. “Mon Dieu, tu es fatiguée!”
“I’m more than tired. I want to retreat undisturbed, at least for a while, into a novocained existence.”
As he helped me off with my coat, he asked where my other things were. My suitcases?
I pointed toward the stairs and with barely a nod, he went after them. When he reappeared at the doorway with a suitcase in each hand, he asked, “Shall I hang up your clothes?”
; “Don’t bother,” I told him. “They need your concern a lot less than I do.”
As he moved, his eyes seemed to fix upon me as though I were a navigational chart and he was afraid of losing his way. I patted the space next to me on the sofabed. “Come, Roger, sit here. I’ll tell you some things that you’ll like to hear.”
Obedient as a schoolboy, he did as he was told. Then he placed his hands in his lap and stared at them as if attempting to understand a strange and unfathomable entity.
I brought him to me, stroking his face with my fingertips. Gradually, I felt his tension ease. He was submitting to me because only I had the power to make all the bad go away. Shoo! Oh, God, Roger, I wish, I really wish I could do that for you. I’ll try to do that for you.
“What I did that was wrong,” I told him, “I’m very sorry about. But you must never think that it was because I didn’t care for you. Because as much as I know how to love, Roger, I love you.”
31
THE PARIS MORNING that woke me was periwinkle blue. A diffused light caught the high points of his face, especially the forehead and cheeks, with a cool lucent quality. And that’s when it came to me that if I were the photographer, I’d know exactly what I wanted to photograph and why.
My hand made a crescent sweep across Roger’s warm bare back and I got to wondering if something can still have value even if it lasts for only a little while. He pressed toward me as a small boat might wash gently against its moorings. I answered my own question: Longevity can’t be the only test of love.
Then it wasn’t true what I had feared. After Germany I felt far too splintered to ever again, on my own volition, give anything away. From me there’d be no pennies to the poor or bread to the hungry or words of cheer to the lonely. I couldn’t possibly give anything away because, as it was, there was already too little left that was me.
With you, Roger, I don’t think it was like that. At least with you I still had something to give, didn’t I? And funny thing is, I have felt neither depleted nor deprived for the experience.
At the same time the bells of St. Sulpice began solemnly stroking out the morning hour of eight, Roger and I strolled into Jacques’s café. The oversized espresso machine emitted soft, throaty sounds while the pungent smell of the coffee seemed as reassuring as a small-town scene painted by Norman Rockwell.
As soon as Jacques spotted me, he rushed from behind the counter, welcoming me with “Encore à la café du Jacques, et encore à votre santé!” He wiped his hands on his morning-fresh, around-the-belly white apron before offering them to me. Even after I assured him under direct questioning that I was beginning to feel good again, he told me that to feel good again it was absolutely necessary for me to regain my lost weight.
Roger and I slid in next to each other at a window table and although we were acutely alert to one another’s presence, neither of us broke our mutually cherished habit of morning silence. He read Le Monde while sipping espresso and I sipped Jacques’s steaming café au lait while watching chilled pedestrians walk with long quick strides down Place St. Sulpice.
After a while, I stopped staring at the Parisians and he stopped reading the newspaper. “We didn’t talk much last night,” he said. “You haven’t as yet mentioned your trip. Was Germany everything you hoped for?”
“Not what I hoped for, no. I was seven months late. Mrs. Reiker died in June.”
“Oh,” he said, covering my hand with his own. And I wondered if we had ever achieved more intimacy than now. It was true, and yet how could that be? Handholding is still primary-grade stuff. And in these months hadn’t we shared our bodies and our beds? A lot of external visions and a few internal fears? Now our possession-in-common is only a moment of shared sorrow.
“Roger, I want you to know how I feel,” I told him, while emotionally rushing from the scene. “Only ... I can’t talk about it ... not yet.”
Leaning his head back, he closed his eyes without releasing my hand. “I think I can guess how you feel. It must feel something like being forced to climb an unscalable mountain. Ignoring cold, hunger, and fatigue to continue that ascent to the very summit. Only to discover, once you get there, that it’s all been for nothing. Because there is nothing there for you.”
“... nothing there for me?”
Roger looked enormously surprised. “Was there? Something?”
I heard myself sigh. “I guess not. I don’t know! Maybe.”
“So you did,” said Roger, breaking into an I-caught-you grin, “find something there, didn’t you?”
I breathed in deep enough to activate what energy I had. “Only that I could do it. That I, surprisingly actually, had the strength to do it. Also there was that view from the heights. That’s when I saw—clearly saw—that there was more than one mountain in my life. Some could be seen and some couldn’t be, but just the same, they were all out there. All out there waiting for me.
“But what was climbed was already climbed, and I understand now that I’ll never have to chase that vision or scale that particular mountain again.”
Also by Bette Greene
- Summer of My German Soldier
- The Drowning of Stephan Jones
- Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe.
- Get On Out of Here, Philip Hall
- I’ve Already Forgotten Your Name, Philip Hall!
A Biography of Bette Greene
BETTE GREENE was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 28, 1934, and grew up across the Harahan Bridge in Arkansas cotton country, thirty-five miles west of Memphis. Bette’s first twelve years were spent in Parkin, Arkansas, a town of 1,100, with two streets and no stop signs, in the very buckle of the Bible Belt.
With the birth of the family’s second child, Marsha, the care and protection of four-year-old Bette became the responsibility of the family servant and housekeeper, Ruth, with whom Bette came to share a child-mother bond. Ruth, a long-suffering, spiritual black woman, engaged Bette’s precocious curiosity with stories and songs. In Ruth’s arms, Bette knew unconditional love, but also felt the fear and anguish instilled by the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan.
Bette’s elementary school classroom was a place of despair: She and her classmates, many of whom were the shoeless and hungry children of sharecroppers, learned straight from the chalkboard with no access to books. When the last bell of the day rang, Bette knew many of her fellow students would join the black children in the cotton fields, working until dark.
At age seven, Bette, tired of the ten-mile walk to the nearest library from her small town, was allowed to travel to Memphis to visit her grandmother. After riding the train alone from Parkin to Memphis, Bette was met by her grandmother, Tilly, and a chauffeur, and driven to the Peabody Hotel. Tilly, the family matriarch, took Bette into her world. Their love and trust for each other grew over many lunches and conversation punctuated with Yiddish phrases.
On one such occasion, Tilly gave Bette a four-inch-thick dictionary. The gift fed Bette’s voracious hunger for knowledge, and she promised Tilly that she would learn every word. That same year, at Tilly’s request, Bette wrote a letter to Pope Pius XII begging for his help in locating Tilly’s brothers, missing in battle in Lithuania during World War II.
At age eight, Bette submitted an account of a Parkin barn fire, complete with burning cows, to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. The story was published and Bette received her first byline—and twenty-four cents—making her the youngest professional journalist of her time. Bette’s experience growing up in the only Jewish family in a suffocatingly small Southern town would later inform her award-winning novel Summer of My German Soldier.
After entering the University of Alabama in 1952, Bette became a consistent betting winner, putting her money on Coach Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide. But when the English faculty ruled that Bette could not be admitted into the creative writing program until she completed courses of English grammar, Bette said, “Bye, bye ’bama!”
In 1953, Bette began school at Memphis State
University. She became feature editor for the Tiger Rag while also writing for United Press International and publishing stories worldwide.
Then, in 1954, Bette took her tuition money and fled to Paris, France, enrolling at Alliance Française and spending a year studying French, life, and love.
In 1955, Bette returned to Memphis and began work as a freelance writer for the Commercial Appeal. At the same time, she turned down an invitation from Colonel Tom Parker to write about a new talent he was managing, an unknown singer named Elvis Presley, as it was known that the Colonel didn’t pay. Bette soon left for New York City and entered Columbia University to study writing. She quickly became Columbia’s “rising literary star” and was offered a significant publishing deal for her first novel, Counter Point, My Love. Unhappy with the novel, rather than accept the deal she tore up the manuscript and watched it burn in her fireplace.
Bette married Dr. Donald Sumner Greene, a neurologist from Boston, in 1959. Leaving her Southern roots, she moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where her two children, Carla and Jordan, were born. In the security of their family home, Bette wrote Summer of My German Soldier while studying creative writing at Harvard University.
In 1973, after thirty-seven rejections, Summer of My German Soldier was published. The novel garnered numerous awards and honors, including the first Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers, and the Massachusetts Children’s Book Award. The novel was also named a New York Times Outstanding Book and an ALA Notable Book, and was a National Book Award finalist. Summer of My German Soldier was translated into ten languages.
The television film Summer of My German Soldier would go on to win the Humanitas Prize for human dignity, meaning, and freedom in 1978, and that same year, Esther Rolle won an Emmy for her performance as Ruth. The screenplay was written and adapted by Bette Greene and Jane-Howard Hammerstein.