The bombed-out lot Lankes bought in Wersten about a year ago was paid for, or perhaps we should say puffed for, with the cigarettes of his friends and acquaintances.
This was the Lankes with whom Oskar traveled to Normandy. We took an express train. Lankes would rather have hitchhiked. But since he was my guest and I was paying, he had to give in. We went by bus from Caen to Cabourg. Past poplars behind which were meadows bordered by hedges. Brown-and-white cows gave the countryside the look of an ad for milk chocolate. Of course the shiny paper wouldn't dare show the obvious war damage that still marked and disfigured every village, including the little town of Bavent, where I'd lost my Roswitha.
From Cabourg we walked along the beach toward the mouth of the Orne. It was not raining. Just before Le Home, Lankes said, "We're home now, boy! Got a cigarette?" Even while switching the coin from pocket to pocket, he pointed with his wolf's head stretched toward one of the numerous undamaged pillboxes in the dunes. Long-armed, he held his knapsack, the sketching easel, and a dozen stretched canvases on the left, put his right arm around me, and pulled me toward the concrete. Oskar's luggage consisted of a small suitcase and his drum.
On the third day of our stay on the Atlantic coast—in the meantime we had cleared the interior of Dora Seven of drifted sand, removed the unsightly traces of lovers who'd sought shelter there, and furnished the space with a crate and our sleeping bags—Lankes returned from the beach with a good-sized cod. Some fishermen had given it to him. He'd tossed off a sketch of their boat, they'd palmed off part of their catch.
Since we were still calling the pillbox Dora Seven, it's no wonder Oskar's thoughts turned to Sister Dorothea while cleaning the fish. Liver and milt from the fish flowed over both his hands. I was facing the sun as I scaled the cod, and Lankes took the occasion to dash off a quick watercolor. We sat behind the pillbox, sheltered from the wind. The August sun did a headstand on the concrete dome. I began larding the fish with garlic. The cavity once filled with milt, liver, and guts I stuffed with onions, cheese, and thyme, but didn't throw liver and milt away, lodged both delicacies between the fish's jaws, which I wedged open with a lemon. Lankes nosed about in the area. Scavenging, he disappeared into Dora Four, Three, and bunkers farther on. He returned with boards and some large cartons he could use to paint on, and bequeathed the wood to the little fire.
We had no trouble keeping the fire going all day, since the beach was pierced every step or two by dry, feather-light driftwood casting changing shadows. Over the hot, glowing coals, which were now ready, I laid part of an iron balcony railing that Lankes had torn off a deserted beach villa. I rubbed the fish with olive oil and set it on the hot grate, also oiled. I squeezed lemon over the crackling cod, and slowly—for you mustn't rush a fish—readied it for the table.
The table consisted of several empty buckets covered by a large piece of tar-board folded in several places. We had our own forks and tin plates. To distract Lankes—who was circling around the slowly steeping fish like a hungry gull after carrion—I brought my drum out from the bunker. I bedded it down in the sand and played against the wind, constantly changing rhythm, breaking up the sounds of the surf and the rising tide: Bebra's Theater at the Front had come to inspect concrete. From Kashubia to Normandy. Felix and Kitty, the two acrobats, knotted and unknotted themselves on top of the pillbox, recited against the wind—just as Oskar played against the wind—a poem whose refrain proclaimed in the midst of war a coming age of primal gemütlichkeit: "...and Sunday's roast with leaves of bay: The bourgeois life is on its way!" Kitty declaimed in her slight Saxon accent; and Bebra, my wise Bebra, captain of the Propaganda Corps, nodded; and Roswitha, my Mediterranean Raguna, picked up the picnic basket, set the table on concrete, on top of Dora Seven; and Corporal Lankes too ate our white bread, drank our chocolate, smoked Captain Bebra's cigarettes...
"Man, Oskar!" Lankes called me back from the past. "I wish I could paint the way you drum; got a cigarette?"
So I stopped drumming, handed my traveling companion a cigarette, checked the fish and saw that it was good: its eyes bulged tender, soft, and white. Slowly, not missing a spot, I squeezed some lemon over the partially browned, partially cracked skin of the cod.
"Me hungry!" said Lankes. He bared his long, pointed yellow teeth and pounded his chest apelike with both fists against his checkered shirt.
"Heads or tails?" I put to him and slid the fish onto a sheet of wax paper covering the tar-board as a tablecloth. "What would you advise?" Lankes asked, pinching out his cigarette and stowing away the butt.
"As a friend I'd say take the tail. As a cook I've got to recommend the head. But if my mama, who ate a lot of fish, were here now, she'd say take the tail, Herr Lankes, then you know what you've got. The doctor, on the other hand, always advised my father..."
"I stay away from doctors," Lankes said distrustfully.
"Dr. Hollatz always advised my father, when it came to cod, which we call dorsch, always to eat the head."
"Then I'll take the tail. I can see you're trying to pull a fast one on me!" Lankes was still suspicious.
"So much the better for Oskar. I like a good head."
"Then I'll take the head, if you want it so bad."
"You have a hard life, Lankes," I said, to put an end to the conversation. "The head is yours, I'll take the tail."
"Hey, I put one over on you, didn't I?"
Oskar admitted that Lankes had put one over on him. I knew his fish would only taste good if seasoned with the certainty that he'd put one over on me. I called him a sharp customer, a lucky dog, he must have been born on Sunday—and we pitched into the cod.
He took the head, I squeezed the rest of the lemon juice over the white, crumbling flesh of the tail, from which the butter-soft garlic cloves loosened and fell.
Lankes pried bones from between his teeth, peered over at me and the tail piece: "Let me try some of your tail." I nodded, he tried some, still wasn't sure, till Oskar took a bite of the head and reassured him: as usual he had snagged the better piece.
We drank Bordeaux with the fish. I was sorry about that, said I'd have preferred white wine in the coffee cups. Lankes waved off my concerns, they always drank red wine in Dora Seven when he was a corporal, he recalled, right up till the invasion: "Man, were we drunk when it all started up. Kowalski, Scherbach, and little Leuthold, all buried back there in the same graveyard on the other side of Cabourg, they didn't have a clue what was happening. The English at Arromanches, and loads of Canadians in our sector. They were on to us, saying 'How are you?' before we could get our suspenders up"
Then, stabbing the air with his fork and spitting out bones: "By the way, I saw that nut Herzog today in Cabourg, you met him on your tour of inspection. A lieutenant."
Of course Oskar remembered Lieutenant Herzog. Lankes went on to tell me over fish that Herzog came to Cabourg year in and year out with maps and surveying instruments, because the pillboxes kept him awake nights. He planned to come by Dora Seven too, and take measurements.
We were still on our fish—which was slowly revealing its large, bony structure—when Lieutenant Herzog arrived. Khaki shorts, muscular bulging calves above tennis shoes, gray-brown hair sprouting from his open linen shirt. Naturally we stayed seated. Lankes introduced me as his friend and comrade-in-arms Oskar, and still called Herzog "Lieutenant," although he was now retired.
The retired lieutenant immediately began inspecting Dora Seven, starting with the outside, which Lankes allowed him to do. He filled out charts, pestered the countryside and oncoming tide with his telescope. He caressed the gun slits of Dora Six, right next to us, so tenderly you would have thought he was pleasuring his wife. When he wanted to inspect the interior of Dora Seven, our vacation cottage, Lankes resisted: "Man, Herzog, what is it you want? Fiddling around here with concrete. That was news once, but it's all passé now."
Passé is a pet term with Lankes. He tends to divide the world into contemporary and passé. But for the retired lieutenan
t nothing was passé, things still didn't add up, they'd all have to answer to history many times over in the coming years, and he was going to inspect the interior of Dora Seven now: "I hope I've made myself clear, Lankes."
Herzog had already cast his shadow across our table and fish. He started to go past us and into the pillbox, above the entrance of which concrete ornaments still bore witness to the artistic hand of Corporal Lankes.
Herzog didn't make it past our table. Without dropping his fork, Lankes's fist shot up and laid out retired Lieutenant Herzog on the sand. Shaking his head, deploring the disruption of our fish fest, Lankes rose, bunched the lieutenant's linen shirt at his chest, dragged him off to one side, tracing a smooth, straight track in the sand, and tossed him down the dune, where we could no longer see him but still had to listen to him. Herzog gathered up his surveying instruments, which Lankes had flung after him, and withdrew cursing, conjuring up all the ghosts of history that Lankes had called passé.
"He's not all that far off, is Herzog, even if he is a nutter. If we hadn't been so drunk when it all started back then, who knows what might have happened to those Canadians."
I could only nod in agreement, for just the day before, at low tide, I'd found among the seashells and empty prawn husks a telltale button from a Canadian uniform. Oskar stowed the button away in his wallet, as pleased as if he'd found a rare Etruscan coin.
Lieutenant Herzog's visit, brief though it was, had stirred up memories: "Do you remember, Lankes, when our frontline troupe was inspecting your concrete and we had breakfast on top of the pillbox, there was a slight breeze, just like today; and all at once six or seven nuns appeared, searching for prawns among the Rommel asparagus, and you were ordered to clear the beach, Lankes, and did, with a deadly round of machine-gun fire."
Lankes remembered, sucked on fish bones, even knew their names, Sister Scholastika, Sister Agneta, named them in turn, described the novice as a rosy face framed in black, portrayed her so clearly that the image of my secular hospital nurse, Sister Dorothea, which I carry with me always, was not so much submerged as partially obscured; and was even further obscured when, a few minutes after his description—but not so surprisingly as to constitute a miracle—a young nun, pink and framed in black, could hardly be missed billowing across the dunes from the direction of Cabourg.
She was warding off the sun with a black umbrella of the kind elderly gentlemen carry. Above her eyes arched an intensely green celluloid shade resembling the visors worn by busy Hollywood filmmakers. They were calling for her in the dunes. There seemed to be more nuns out there. "Sister Agneta!" they called. "Sister Agneta, where are you?"
And Sister Agneta, the young thing who could be seen above our clearly delineated codfish skeleton, replied, "Here, Sister Scholastika. There's no wind at all here."
Lankes grinned and nodded complacently with his wolf's head, as if he had ordered up this Catholic parade, as if nothing could surprise him.
The young nun spotted us and stood to the left of the pillbox. Her rosy face, with two circular nostrils, said between slightly protruding but otherwise perfect teeth, "Oh."
Lankes turned his head and neck without moving his upper body: "Well, Sister, taking a little stroll?"
How quickly the answer came: "We visit the seashore once a year. But for me it's the first time. The ocean's so big."
There was no denying it. To this very day, that description of the ocean seems to me the only one that truly hits the mark.
Lankes played host, poked about in my portion of fish and offered her some: "Try a little fish, Sister? It's still warm." His free and easy French astonished me, and Oskar tried the foreign language too: "You don't have to worry, Sister. It's Friday."
But even this allusion to the no doubt rigid rules of her order could not convince the young woman so cleverly hidden beneath her habit to partake of our repast.
"Do you live here?" curiosity impelled her to ask. She found our bunker charming, if slightly odd. At this point, unfortunately, the Mother Superior and five other nuns with black umbrellas and green reporter's visors entered the picture over the crest of the dune. Agneta dashed off and, as far as I could gather from the flurry of words clipped short by the east wind, was given a good scolding and taken back into their circle.
Lankes was dreaming. He held his fork upside down in his mouth and stared at the billowing group on the dune: "Those aren't nuns, they're sailing ships."
"Sailing ships are white," I pointed out.
"Those are black sailing ships." It was hard to argue with Lankes. "The one out on the left is the flagship. Agnetas a speedy corvette. Good sailing weather: column formation, jib to stern post, mizzenmast, mainmast and foremast, all sails set, heading toward the horizon, toward England. Just think: the Tommies wake up tomorrow morning, look out the window, and what do they see?—twenty-five thousand nuns, flags flying from the mast tops, and here comes the first broadside..."
"A new religious war," I helped him. The flagship should be named the Mary Stuart or the De Valera, or better still, the Don Juan. A new, more mobile armada avenges Trafalgar. "Death to all Puritans" is the watchword, and this time the English don't have a Nelson on hand. Let the invasion begin: England's no longer an island.
The conversation was getting a little too political for Lankes. "Now they're steaming away, the nuns," he reported.
"Sailing away," I corrected him.
Sailing or steaming, they billowed off toward Cabourg. They held umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun. But one lagged a little behind, bent down between steps, picking up and discarding. The rest of the fleet—to stick with the metaphor—made their way slowly on, tacking into the wind, toward the burned-out shell of the former beach hotel.
"She didn't get her anchor up, or her rudder's damaged." Lankes was sticking with sea lingo. "Isn't that the speedy corvette Agneta?"
Corvette or frigate, it was the novice Agneta coming toward us, gathering and discarding seashells.
"What's that you're gathering, Sister?" Lankes could see very well what it was.
"Seashells." She pronounced the word very clearly and bent down.
"Are you allowed to do that? Those are earthly goods, after all"
I supported the novice Agneta: "You're wrong, Lankes. There's nothing earthly about seashells."
"Then they're stranded goods, goods in any case, and nuns aren't allowed to have them. For them it's poverty, poverty, and more poverty. Right, Sister?"
Sister Agneta smiled with protruding teeth: "I just take a few. They're for the kindergarten. The little ones love to play with them, and they've never been to the seashore."
Agneta stood at the entrance to the pillbox and cast a nun's glance inside.
"How do you like our little home?" I said, cozying up to her. Lankes was more direct: "Take a tour of our villa. Costs nothing to look, Sister."
She scraped the tips of her shoes below the sturdy stuff of her habit, stirring up sand that the wind lifted and sprinkled over our fish. Somewhat more uncertain now, with eyes distinctly light brown, she examined us and the table between us. "Surely I shouldn't," she replied, asking to be contradicted.
"Oh come now, Sister!" the painter said, sweeping all objections aside, and rising. "It's got a great view, the bunker. You can see the whole beach through the gun slits."
She still hesitated, her shoes now surely full of sand. Lankes extended his hand into the pillbox entrance. His concrete ornaments cast strong, ornamental shadows. "It's clean inside." Perhaps it was the artist's gesture of invitation that brought the nun into the bunker. "Just for a moment, then," came the decisive word. She whished into the pillbox ahead of Lankes. He wiped his hands on his trousers—a typical painter's gesture—and warned me before disappearing: "Don't eat my fish!"
But Oskar had had his fill of fish. I withdrew from the table, remained at the mercy of the sandy wind and the blustering noise of the tide and the sea, that swaggering old strongman. With my foot I dragged my drum
closer and began drumming, tried to drum my way out of this concrete landscape, this pillbox world, this vegetable called Rommel asparagus.
First, and with scant success, I tried love: Once upon a time I too had loved a Sister. Not a nun, to be sure, but a nurse. She lived in Zeidler's flat, behind a door of frosted glass. She was beautiful, and yet I never saw her. A coco runner came between us. It was too dark in Zeidler's hall. And so I felt the coco fibers much more clearly than Sister Dorothea's body.
When this theme ended all too quickly on the coco runner, I tried to convert my early love for Maria to rhythm and plant it like rapidly growing ivy in front of the pillbox. But once again Sister Dorothea stood in the way of my love for Maria: the smell of carbolic acid drifted in from the sea, gulls beckoned in nurses' uniforms, the sun seemed to glow like a Red Cross pin.
Oskar was actually glad when his drumming was interrupted. The Mother Superior, Sister Scholastika, had returned with her five nuns. They looked tired, held their umbrellas at a forlorn slant: "Have you seen a young nun, our young novice? The child is so young. It's the first time the child has seen the ocean. She must have lost her way. Where are you, Sister Agneta?"
There was nothing I could do but send the little billowing squad, this time with the wind at their backs, off toward the mouth of the Orne, Arromanches, and Port Winston, where the English once wrested their artificial harbor from the sea. There wouldn't have been room for all of them in the bunker anyway. I'd been tempted, just for a moment, to let them pay Lankes a surprise visit, but then friendship, disgust, and malice combined to make me lift my thumb toward the mouth of the Orne. The nuns obeyed my thumb, turned into six steadily shrinking, wavering black dots on the crest of the dune; and their plaintive "Sister Agneta, Sister Agneta!" turned increasingly windswept, till it was buried at last in the sand.