open all of them, monsieur?’
‘Naturally,’ Emhof said.
When all six glasses were poured, Emhof said ‘ Sieg Heil ’, and raised his glass as the other four Germans repeated the toast. Stahl looked away, and two or three heads turned towards them at nearby tables.
Yes, Stahl thought, Chateau Margaux was transcendent — if only he’d been with a lover or with friends, he would have enjoyed it.
The lunch arrived soon thereafter; an appetizer plate of caviar with blini and chopped egg. And then the tournedos. As the plates were set down, all the Germans said, ‘Ahh.’ Had this been a table of Parisians, some light conversation would have been maintained — to talk while dining demanded a certain level of skill. Not the Germans, they fell on the tournedos with avid concentration, while the old man from Stahl’s Barcelona days ate in such a way, eyes never leaving his plate, that it occurred to Stahl it might have been some time since he’d had a good meal. Meanwhile, Stahl ate some of his sole.
As the plates were taken away, Emhof dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and said, ‘The French can cook, that much we must say for them.’
The others nodded and agreed.
‘And they must be encouraged to continue, no matter what,’ said the man next to Emhof.
No matter what? This remark, with just a hint of knowing undertone, was, Stahl sensed, meant to go over his head and resonate with the man’s colleagues.
Emhof intervened, making sure the man to his left did not elaborate. ‘It isn’t only cooking, there are many things that the French — ‘He was winding up to expand on this theme but he stopped dead and his face lit with anticipation as a waiter appeared, rolling a cart that held a large pan, cordials, and a plate of crepes — here were the makings of Crepes Suzette!
‘Oh-ho,’ said Moppi, grinning and rubbing his hands.
‘I wonder,’ Emhof said, turning to face Stahl, ‘if you would be willing to listen to an idea that’s just now occurred to me.’
‘I will always listen,’ Stahl said.
‘Our festival of mountain movies begins in November, in Berlin, and we are going to offer a number of prizes, in various categories; technical achievement, performance, umm, spiritual value — just like the Oscars.’ He paused, Stahl waited. ‘So, of course, if there are prizes, there must be judges. Is there any chance you would consider coming over — even for a day, I know you’re a busy man — to be one of them? Think of the film-makers, how excited they would be just to meet a man of your stature. And there is quite a substantial honorarium to be paid, twenty thousand reichsmarks — ten thousand dollars in American money. Only a day’s work, Herr Stalka, Herr Fredric Stahl, and Lufthansa will fly you over and back. What do you think?’
‘I think I won’t be coming to your festival, Herr Emhof. And I won’t be coming to any more lunches, and I won’t be answering Herr Moppi’s telephone calls, or letters, or telegrams. And if Herr Moppi shows up again at a movie set where I’m working, I’ll have him arrested. Have I made myself clear?’
‘Speaking of movies,’ said the man to Emhof’s left, addressing all at the table, ‘I saw once again, last week, the magnificent Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.’
‘What an actress,’ Emhof said.
‘Oh she was wonderful, wasn’t she,’ Moppi said. ‘What was she called? I can never remember.’
‘Lola Lola,’ said Emhof. ‘Memorable, one of our greatest films.’
‘Right! Lola Lola!’ Moppi said.
Stahl rose, placed his napkin by his plate, said, ‘Good day, gentlemen,’ and walked towards the door. Behind him, the old man said, ‘Good day, sir.’ At a table near the maitre d’ station sat a very respectable couple, drinking wine and waiting for their next course. The man, dressed to perfection in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and sober tie, his mouth set in prim disapproval, turned his head towards Stahl and, just for an instant, met his eyes, then looked away. Stahl continued towards the door. The last thing he heard from the table of Germans was a cry of delight as the liqueurs in the crepe pan were set ablaze.
The cast out at Joinville worked hard the following day. Stahl and the others had not yet ‘dropped their scripts’, but they could rehearse by glancing over their lines and setting their scripts aside, which freed them to move around and add physical action to the dialogue.
In the film, the three legionnaires have found a morning’s work, cleaning an olive-oil mill in a small Turkish town. When they are paid — much less than promised — they replace their tattered uniforms with old clothing from the local souk. They are then seen on a platform at the railway station, waiting for a local train which will eventually take them to the last stop in Turkey where, since they have no papers, they plan a clandestine crossing at night, into Syria. They expect that Syria, a French colonial possession since the end of the Great War, will be a place where they can acquire passports and money.
They ride for a few stops, and begin to believe their plan will work, but then they are discovered by a conductor and, without tickets, they are thrown off the train in some tiny village. In the same carriage, the character played by Justine Piro is also unable to produce a ticket and she is pushed out the door of the railway carriage. Her character, called Ilona, says she is an impoverished Hungarian countess, and needs only to reach Hungary, where she has money and family. In return for the legionnaires’ protection, she will help them when they get to Budapest.
Having identified Stahl’s Colonel Vadic as the leader of the trio, she seeks to enlist his sympathy. ‘How on earth did you wind up in Turkey?’ Vadic asks her.
‘My fiance was a diplomat, sent to Istanbul when the war began, and he brought me there.’
‘What happened?’ the lieutenant asks.
‘What often happens,’ she says.
‘He abandoned you?’ Pasquin’s sergeant says. ‘ You? ’
Avila broke in. ‘The sergeant doesn’t really believe anything she says, Pasquin, but he is amused by her lie, so he should smile with that line.’
The sergeant, it later turns out, is correct — Ilona is not Hungarian, not a countess, and there never was a fiance. Pasquin and Justine Piro worked at the two-line sequence for a time, trying it in a slightly altered form on each repetition, as Avila commented and suggested different variations.
By 3.00 p.m., when the costumed upper-class rakes and ingenues arrived for their boulevard comedy, the cast of Apres la Guerre had been at it for five hours. As they prepared to leave, Avila took Stahl aside and asked if he would mind going over to Building K, where Renate Steiner, the costume designer, needed him for a fitting. Stahl was worn out, it had been a long rehearsal and, after the lunch at Maxim’s the day before, he’d had trouble sleeping. But of course he had to go off to Building K.
At Building K, a different Renate Steiner. Dark-haired and fair-skinned, with a sharp jawline and a pointy nose, she wore the same blue work-smock over a long dress, thick stockings, and laced boots. But her smile, ironic and subtly challenging, was not to be seen, and her faded blue eyes, that had caught his interest, were swollen and faintly red. Was something wrong? He didn’t know her well enough to ask. Better just to assume her life, like his, like everybody else’s, had its ups and downs.
‘Thank you for coming over,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’re tired — when you work with Avila you don’t take time off, because he never does.’
‘I’m used to hard work,’ he said. ‘All going well?’
She shrugged. ‘Well enough, I guess. Let’s get you into uniform, Fredric.’ She nodded towards a curtain in one corner, her changing room, and handed him the uniform. ‘While you change clothes, I’ll get your boots,’ she said.
He reappeared as Colonel Vadic, his Foreign Legion uniform bleached out and artfully torn at the sleeve. She looked him over with a critical eye, then shook her head. Lord, why me? As she snatched a lump of tailor’s chalk from her work table she said, ‘I’m training a new seamstress, so there will be mistakes.’ With a strong hand she grabbed the shoulder of his tunic, moved it back and forth, then flattened it out and drew a line for a new seam. ‘And I have three more of these,’ she said, irritation in her voice. ‘A duplicate of this one, because God-only-knows what happens on movie sets, one even more distressed, for your travels in the desert, and the last one, terribly ratty, that you try to sell at the used-clothing stall in the souk. The merchant has a funny line about it, if I remember correctly.’
It took some time — there was something wrong with each uniform — and the late-afternoon light outside
