The Polish Officer

together.” He had a hard face, the bones sharply evident beneath the skin, and smoked a cigarette in an ivory holder clenched between his teeth.

Junger excused himself from the table, M. Pertot spoke confidentially to his niece, the waiter poured wine in Mademoiselle Beilis’s glass.

“Is that what you meant, Herr Lezhev?” Freddi said quietly.

“Yes. We’ll have one Europe now, with strong leadership. And strength is the only thing we Europeans understand.”

Freddi Schoen nodded agreement. He was fairly drunk, and seemed preoccupied with some interior dialogue. “I envy you your craft,” he said after a moment.

“Mine?” Lezhev’s smile was tart.

“Yes, yours. It is difficult,” Freddi said.

“It cannot be ‘easy’ to be a naval officer, Lieutenant Schoen.”

“Pfft.” Freddi Schoen laughed to himself. “Sign a paper, give an order. The petty officers, clerks, you know, tell me what to do. It can be technical. But people like yourself, who can see a thing, and can make it come alive.” He shook his head.

Lezhev squinted one eye. “You write, Lieutenant.” A good-humored accusation.

A pink flush spread along Freddi Schoen’s jawline, and he shook his head.

“No? Then what?”

“I, ah, put some things on canvas.”

“You paint.”

“I try, sometimes . . .”

“Portraits? Nudes?”

“Country scenes.”

“Now that is difficult.”

“I try to take the countryside, and to express an emotion. To feel what emotion it has, and to bring that out. The melancholy of autumn. In spring, abandon.”

Lezhev smiled, and nodded as though confirming something to himself—now this fellow makes sense, all night I wondered, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

“Here is . . . guess who!” The wild shout came from Lieutenant Junger, who had returned to the table with a tall, striking Frenchwoman in captivity. She was a redhead, fortyish, with a Cupid’s-bow mouth, carmine lipstick, and a pair of enormous breasts corseted to sharp points in a black silk evening dress. Junger held her tightly above the elbow.

“Please forgive the intrusion,” she said.

“Tell them!” Junger shouted. “You must!” He was a small-boned man with narrow shoulders and tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Very drunk and sweaty and pale at the moment, and swaying back and forth.

“My name is Fifi,” she said. “My baptismal name is Francoise, but Fifi I am called.”

Junger doubled over and howled with laughter. Pertot and Baillot de Coutry and the two nieces wore the taut smiles of people who just know the punchline of the joke will be hilarious when it comes.

Freddi Schoen said, “Paul?” but Junger gasped for breath and, shaking the woman by jerking on her elbow, managed to whisper, “Say what you do! Say what you do!”

Her smile was now perhaps just a degree forced. “I work in the cloakroom—take the customers’ coats and hats.”

“The hatcheck girl! Fifi the French hatcheck girl!” Junger whooped with laughter and grabbed at the table to steady himself; the cloth began to slide but Pertot—the cheerful, expectant smile on his face remaining absolutely fixed in place—shot out a hand and grabbed the bottle of Petrus. A balloon glass of melon balls in kirsch tumbled off the edge of the table and several waiters came rushing over to clean up.

“Bad Paul, bad Paul.” Traudl von Behr’s eyes glowed with admiration. She had square shoulders and straw hair and very white skin that had turned even redder at Lieutenant Junger’s performance. “Well, sit down,” she said to the tall Frenchwoman. “You must tell us all about those hats, and how you check them.”

Junger shrieked with laughter. The corner of Fifi’s mouth trembled and a man with gray hair materialized at her side and led her away. “A problem in the cloakroom!” he called back over his shoulder, joining the mood just enough to make good their escape.

“Those two! They were like that in school,” Freddi Schoen said to Lezhev. “We all were.” He smiled with amused recollection. “Such a sweet madness,” he added. “Such a special time. Do you know the University of Gottingen?”

“I don’t,” Lezhev said.

“If only I had your gift—it is not like other places, and the students are not like other students. Their world has,” he thought a moment, “a glow!” he said triumphantly.

Lezhev understood. Freddi Schoen could see that he did. Strange to find such sympathy in a Russian, usually blunt and thick-skinned. A pea hit him in the temple. He covered his eyes with his hand—what could you do with such friends? He glanced over to see Traudl von Behr using a page torn from the carte des vins, rolled up into a blowpipe. She was bombarding a couple at another table, who pretended not to notice.

“It’s hopeless,” Freddi Schoen said to Lezhev. “But I would like to continue this conversation some other time.”

“This week, perhaps?”

Freddi Schoen started to answer, then Junger yelled his name so he shrugged and nodded yes and turned to see what his friend wanted.

Lezhev excused himself and went to the palatial men’s room, all sage-colored marble and polished brass fixtures. He stared at his face in the mirror and took a deep breath. He seemed to be ten thousand miles away from everything. From one of the stalls came the voice of General Fedin, a rough-edged voice speaking Russian. “We’re alone?”

“Yes.”

“Careful with him, Alexander.”

Noontime, the late July day hot and still. The German naval staff had chosen for its offices a financier’s mansion near the Hotel Bristol, just a few steps off the elegant Faubourg St.-Honore. Lezhev waited in a park across the street as naval officers in twos and threes trotted briskly down the steps of the building and walked around the cobbled carriage path on their way to lunch. When Freddi Schoen appeared outside the door of the mansion and peered around, Lezhev waved.

“You’re certain this will be acceptable?” Freddi Schoen asked, as they walked toward the river.

“I’m sure,” Lezhev said. “Everything’s going well?”

“Ach yes, I suppose it is.”

“Every day something new?” Lezhev said.

“No. You’d have to be in the military to understand. Sometimes a superior officer will really tell off a subordinate. It mustn’t be taken to heart—it’s just the way these things have always been done.”

“Well then, tomorrow it’s your turn.”

“Of course. You’re absolutely right to see it that way.”

They walked through the summer streets, crossed the Seine at the place de la Concorde. Parisians now rode about on bicycle-cart affairs, taxi-bicycles that advertised themselves as offering “Speed, comfort, safety!” The operators—only yesterday Parisian cabdrivers—had changed neither their manners nor their style; now they simply pedaled madly instead of stomping on the accelerator.

“Are you hard at work writing?” Schoen asked.

“Yes, when I can. I have a small job at Parthenon, it takes up most of my time.”

“We all face that.” They admired a pair of French girls in frocks so light they floated even on a windless day. “Good afternoon, ladies,” Schoen said with a charming smile, tipping his officer’s cap. They ignored him with tosses of the head, but not the really serious kind. It seemed to make him feel a little better. “May I ask what you are writing about these days?”

“Oh, all that old Russian stuff—passion for the land, Slavic melancholy, life and fate. You know.”