Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“French Lorraine,” she said dully, holding her cheeks like she was a young grisette who’d been abandoned with a small child and an unfortunate complexion. “He was stationed there during the war. With the Second Bavarian Corps. He always liked it there, in Lorraine. Was always talking about it. He speaks good French, you see. Loves the French. Loves the food. And the women, knowing Johann. That’s where he said he’d go. I’m not sure precisely where. I’ve never been there myself. But once he’s across the French border, he’ll be somewhere in Lorraine.”

What she was saying seemed to fit with the framed maps I’d already seen on the walls, and the pictures of Diesbach in army uniform. It’s odd how one feels about a place that saw so much death; I myself had always wanted to go back to northeastern France and the towns near the Meuse where, in 1916, the Battle of Verdun had been fought. But Korsch wasn’t having any of that.

“You might as well have said Bermuda, missus,” he complained. “It’s seven hundred kilometers from here to the French border. And he won’t have long enough to get that far. When we ask where’s he gone, we mean where is he now, and not where would he like to go on vacation if he won the state lottery.”

He was going to slap her again but this time I stayed his hand because I knew exactly how Frau Diesbach was feeling. Both of us had been slapped enough for one day.

From the top of the skull-like hill all that could be seen was a black-and-white engraving of the inferno that was industrial capitalism.

In many ways the Saarland was just as horrifying as I remembered it from before the war: slag heaps as big as the Egyptian pyramids, a petrified forest of tall industrial chimneys belching so much gray smoke it looked as if the earth itself had caught fire, endless freight trains crawling along a venous system of rail tracks and sidings and double switches and signal boxes, pit wheels turning like the lazy cogs in a very dirty clock, gasometers and warehouses and factory buildings and rusting sheds, canals so black they looked as if they were filled with oil, not water, and all of this under a sky thick with coal dust and bruised by the incessant noise of metalworks and smelters and pile drivers and locomotive engines and end-of-shift whistles. With eyes that were prickling because of the sulfurous air, you could even taste the iron and steel on the back of your tongue and feel a low Morlock hum in the poisoned earth beneath your feet. As a testament to human industry it was not a very pleasing one from an aesthetic point of view. But it was more than merely ugly; it was as if a kind of original sin had been perpetrated against the very landscape, and I thought I might almost have been looking at Niflheim, the dark, misty home of dwarves, where treasure wasn’t only hoarded, it was mined from the ground or forged in secret for the Burgundian kings. The French certainly thought so, which was why they had tried so hard to keep the Saar as a part of France and, like Siegfried, to steal its heavy industrial treasure. The dwarves of the Saarland, however, were as stubbornly German as their Wagnerian counterparts and, in a recent referendum that might have made the territory independent under the auspices of a European commissioner to be appointed by the Western European Union, they had voted no to Europe and the idea of remaining in economic union with France; any month now it was supposed that the so-called Saar Protectorate would finally become part of the Federal Republic of Germany. Every patriotic German certainly hoped so, and throughout the FRG the return of the Saar was generally viewed with enthusiasm, albeit of a more quiet sort than that which had greeted the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. The major difference was that now there were no German troops involved and no treaties repudiated. It was perhaps the most peaceful change of flag in that region in almost a century, and the idea that Germany and France might go to war again about the Saarland already seemed as unthinkable as interplanetary space travel.

In the city of Saarbrücken things were more or less the same as they’d always been, too. Most of the serious damage inflicted by the U.S. Army had been repaired and there was little sign that a world war had ever taken place. But this was never an attractive city and the rebuilding had left the place as hard on the eye as it had always been. Harder, maybe. The French were certainly not about to waste their money on urban planning or public architecture. Any new buildings were functional, not to say brutal; from what little I’d been able to see of the future, it seemed to be fashioned largely from concrete. Landwehrplatz, the main square in Saarbrücken, resembled a German prison yard from which the prisoners had all wisely escaped. Everything was as gray and solidly Germanic as the lead in a Faber-Castell pencil.

Up close, things were a little more ambiguous. All the newspapers and magazines in the kiosks were German, as were most of the street names. Even the names of the shops — Hoffmann, Schulz, Dettweiler, Rata, Schooner, Zum Löwen, Alfred Becker — made me think I might be back in Berlin, but the bunting and the flags and the cars — Peugeots and Citroëns, mostly — were all French, as were the records I heard in bars and restaurants: a lot of Charles Aznavour, Georges Brassens, and Lucienne Delyle. Quite a few of the Saarland police carried the word Gendarmerie on the shoulders of their dark blue uniforms, which provided a clear indication of who they took their orders from. I wasn’t out of the woods yet; not by a long straw. Then there was the money: the official currency of Saarland was the franc, although thoughtfully the French called it the frank, and the denominations on the coins were stamped in German. And the big brands in the shops were mostly French or sometimes American. There were even a few French restaurants of the sort you could have found on the Left Bank in Paris. It was all very strange. With its German simplicity and French pretensions, the Saar resembled some ghastly transvestite — a very muscular man badly in need of a shave who was wearing lipstick and high heels in a hopeless attempt to pass himself off as a pretty coquette.

I bought twenty Pucks and some matches at the tobacconist, a copy of the Saarbrücker Neueste Nachrichten , and in Alfred Becker, a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, a loaf of bread, a box of Président Camembert portions, and a large bar of Kwatta chocolate. I didn’t linger in the supermarket. I was acutely aware of the down-at-heel, beggarly figure I now presented. There was a hole in the knee of my trousers, my shoes were water-stained and ruined, I was badly in need of a shave, and I looked as if I had spent the night sleeping under a hedge, which I had. The people of the Saar might have been poor but unlike me they had washed recently, and their clothes, while not of the best quality, were clean; everyone looked gainfully employed and respectable. It takes a lot to make a hardworking German forget about his or her appearance.

On the road to Homburg, beside the only green space in Brebach, I sat down and ate a little of my bread and cheese and read the newspaper. I was relieved to see nothing about me in the paper, which was dominated by the Hungarian revolution, but even while I was enjoying a rare moment of peace and quiet, a cop on a motorcycle pulled up and gave me a look that was as hard as the passenger saddle on his R51. With his white shirt and dark tie, his long riding boots, his dark blue uniform, his Sam Browne belt, and his matching leather gauntlets he looked more like a pilot in the Luftwaffe than a moto rider. After a while he lifted the goggles onto his crash hat and summoned me with a jerk of his head. I got up off the ground and walked to the side of the bike. Fortunately I hadn’t yet opened the bottle so there was no question of my being drunk. He was German, which was also in my favor.