Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

He was looking at her, and she had the funny feeling that if time and everyone suspended in its viscous grip were just then frozen, only the two of them would be left as they were, sentient and unfrozen.

“What do you like to do,” he asked, “besides paint your legs?”

All men at the Tokio asked this. What do you like? It was part of the tête-à-tête of her profession, but what the men wanted was something from a limited variety of set responses: I like pleasing you. I like squirming on your lap. I like being coquettish and slutty. Giggly and deferent. I like to fantasize about a man just like you watching me take my clothes off. I think about it when I’m alone, and I have to put my own little girl hands in my underwear, just to stop the longing to be on your lap. Gullibility was beside the point: hearing these things was a performance the men were paying for. They didn’t really want to know what she liked, and it never would have occurred to her to tell them. But she figured that the Frenchman, with his bemused half smile, was too clever to want such an obvious put-on. He seemed to understand flirtation — real flirtation, and not a bluntly performed simulation of it. She suspected that if she said “I like squirming on your lap” he’d laugh his head off, and at her expense.

“I like those few days of the year when it’s cold here, at the end of hurricane season,” she said. “It’s cold enough you need a sweater. And at night, blankets. But I don’t fall asleep with blankets over me. I leave them down at the end of the bed and make myself fall asleep uncovered. When I wake up later in the night, freezing cold, I reach down and pull up all the blankets.”

La Mazière pictured her making herself fall asleep cold and uncovered in order to feel warmth with more intensity. He couldn’t help but imagine being the warm body that smothered this petite girl, cold and naked, on a mattress. Though he didn’t want to be just the warmth, he realized, but the cold as well. What preceded, in this fantasy, was him stripping the bed and leaving her shivering in nothing. Maybe underwear. Him making her cold, and then warm.

He looked at her face, so obviously middle European. “I think you should tell me your story,” he said. Not that he didn’t believe the orphaned-at-a-burlesque-club tale, but he wanted something else. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted a made-up story or a true story, or even what the difference was. People talked about character, a defining sort of substance. But deception was a substance as well, as relevant and admirable as what it concealed. If it concealed anything, that is.

“Okay here’s a story,” she said. “A man named Ferdinand K came over from France. He worked in cinema, met a girl named Irene, my grandmother. They had a baby — my mother — the nothing. Then they both dropped dead of venereal diseases. My mother, the orphan, was a street urchin. I don’t know who my father is. I told you the rest of it already.”

“You’ve told me circumstances. Not story.”

“Okay, fine. Maybe you should tell me your story,” she said, catching his eye through the tinted lenses, “Ambassador.”

He smiled as if to say, No problem. Watch me give you nothing. “I’m Christian de La Mazière. And okay, I’m not an ambassador.” He paused. “I’m a journalist.”

“You’re lying,” she said.

“There is that possibility.”

“And you know what else? I have a feeling you dismiss lowly ‘circumstances’ because you’re not willing to cough up your own story.”

“Why should I divulge what is meaningless?” he said. “A banal dossier of ‘this was my grandfather, I was steered into this or that profession.’ My existence is free of those tedious things.”

“I bet the opposite is true. I bet your ‘tedious’ past is a prison.”

“It isn’t a prison,” he said. “You’ll see.”

If only it were tedious, he thought, but didn’t say out loud. If only.

In fact it was sordid and remarkable to have been an incidental SS. Left with no war, no army, no country, only floating memories of medals and Maxim’s and going to fight the Bolsheviks, thinking Fascism was better than Stalin and that he was fighting for heritage and class, and then knowing that he wasn’t. That it had nothing to do with politics or ideals, only passion. Of course, there were some with ideals. Not him. Even if he had conviction — you might call it rare — the conviction to enlist at the Hotel Majestic on a stifling, hot August day in 1944, hours before the Allies rolled in. He’d explained his story as best he could in his memoir The Helmeted Dreamer, making his way, chapter by chapter, through the reasonings and events of his life like rows of a shark’s teeth. When the memoir came out he garnered instant cachet, coeds and housewives practically lining up to sleep with a remorseful former Nazi. Overtures to which he responded with special gratitude, though these engagements were marked by a poignant and troubling intimacy.

Why he enlisted, he still wasn’t sure. He had tried to explain his Huguenot and royalist heritage, a fight against cowardly defeat, against so-called Allies who murdered thirteen hundred French sailors at Mers el-Kábir, in one devastating blow. The impression that the German Army made on a demoralized country and its disheveled, ruined military. The thrill of German boys loitering in the lobby of the Ritz, their muscles pressing up against the perfectly creased fabric of their well-fitting uniforms, anxious to polish his boots. But how to make people understand what had really been at stake? The magnificent glimmer of a traumschloss — a dream castle — and the dream of a glorious Europe. Two great nations, France and Germany, flowing into one historic river, heirs to the rule of Charlemagne. And there was pride, the issue of pride. Rather than manufacture a despicable fiction about having worked all along for the Resistance, he’d chosen honor. The women, especially, were sympathetic to this reasoning. Women always preferred bravery to cowardice, regardless of politics or ethics.

In the end, these reasons, even reason itself, were beside the point. It had been a pure sacrifice, empty of reasons. A bigger, more grand self-erasure. On his way to enlist on that hot August day, the war already lost, he saw people shuttling into the Velodrome. He won’t deny that he saw them being led inside. He was a helmeted dreamer who waited in a German uniform while Marshal Pétain, their “brave leader” of a crumbling Vichy regime, dozed in his chambers. Pétain in his kepi with the scrambled eggs braid, who refused to see them, the few who were ready to keep going, the only people — correction, the only person —with the conviction to fight to lose, to test nothing but extremes. They all caved, and Pétain slept in his kepi with the scrambled eggs braid.

He was a man who had to go it alone, fight with conviction and for nothing, a dream castle, with men who didn’t speak his language. The only one who didn’t cave.

And so here he was, at a burlesque club below the Tropic of Cancer, in a damp city where dreams were marbled with nothingness.

She’d disappeared. He was so lost in thought he hadn’t noticed.

It was time for her show. The blue lights flipped on.

“Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”

Her mother said it was an insurance policy: Dubuque hams, specially ordered from their Oak Ridge grocer. A just-in-case because the native food might be inedible. Seven bulky teardrop cans that Everly and her sisters had to wedge their feet between in the backseat of the Studebaker for the past three days as they made their way across the length of the island. An eighth ham, which they’d opened, was in a cooler of ice that Duffy propped her legs on as she drew faces on Scribbles. Erased them with a special sponge and drew on new ones.