Night was falling. The ocean dark. And up there, once again, the stars, dense as the calligraphy of an indecipherable manuscript. A soft breeze that smelled of pine and eucalyptus, almost imperceptible, grazed the water with a strange silvery phosphorescence. Gerta and André had been lying down on the sand for a while, face-up and without speaking. As if they were on a boat deck and looking out from the island toward the bright city of Cannes with its red and blue lights shining brightly on the horizon. They both had on the sweaters that Ruth suggested at the last minute they pack in their bags. “They will come in handy at night,” she’d said. Gerta could smell the wool on André’s sleeve as she rested her head on his arm.
It was a small and calm fishermen’s island. Barely 370 acres of Mediterranean pines, with a few docked feluccas, nets placed out to dry, and the smell of old port. The perfect resting place for a warrior. André had returned from Spain tired and with a fresh batch of money from the report he sold to Berliner Illustrierte. The francs were burning holes in his pockets; he wasn’t cut out for being rich. So, when he found out that Willi Chardack and some other people they knew were thinking of taking a trip to the Lérins Islands in the Côte d’Azur, he didn’t think twice. He suggested that Chim and the girls come along. Although Ruth had thought it was a great idea, she couldn’t go. She had just signed a contract with the filmmaker Max Ophüls for a small part in a film called Divine, which had begun shooting in Paris. Chim had a deadline for an assignment he accepted from Vu magazine, about the Left Bank’s artists, and decided to stay. André looked over at Gerta, standing there with her bony chin, a slight frown, as she thought it through.
“All right. Why not?” She smiled in agreement.
They made their way to Cannes hitchhiking. Both in an excellent mood, joking around, stealing fruit from orchards, dining at highway café-bars, leaving behind small villages that smelled of sweet broom. New horizons that whet your appetite and make you want to laugh hard, breathe in the fresh air, and get lost in the world. They were seized by a kind of euphoric vitality. Life’s invisible paths. From Cannes’ port, they took a small fishing boat to Île Sainte-Marguerite while the sun darted across the water. There is a strip between the ocean and the earth. Just as there’s an ambiguous strip, dark but radiant, between the body and the soul, thought Gerta. And the image of white clothing hanging out to dry on the balcony came to mind. Karl’s soul. Oskar’s. And hers.
She believed she had arrived in paradise. An island of warm rocks and cormorants, with waves that launched greenish laps, smacking over the sand. A quiet place, without meetings at the crack of dawn, or the echo of footsteps following you to the foot of your door, or broken glass, or dead animals, or equilateral crosses. An island. A piece of land far from a world on the brink of blowing itself to pieces. Sand and ocean. Pure geography.
They built their tents next to the ruins of Fort Royal’s castle, an ancient Gothic fort that was used as a hospital for the wounded during the Crimean War. At night, they’d light a small campfire to cook dinner. And they’d sit with the fire between them.
“A mysterious prisoner lived in those ruins,” said Gerta, and a silence that precedes all great tales of the night was created around her. So within that circle of embers, she told the story of the man with the iron mask.
No one was ever completely certain who he was or what he did to be isolated that way. He wore a velvet mask with iron fittings that allowed him to eat with his mask on. Two guards, whose orders were to kill him should he ever try to escape, accompanied him always. Some swore he was the Sun King’s twin brother. Others believed he was his bastard brother, son of Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin. The fact was that he was taken to Provence under maximum security. In a locked carriage covered in moleskin. From there, they brought him to this island in a small covered vessel. They say he was taller than most men and with a notable elegance. He dressed in the finest of clothes. They were under strict orders not to deny him anything. And they provided him with the most succulent delicacies. Everything he asked for. And no one could remain seated before him. At night, he would play the guitar with a melancholy that would cause the rocks to shudder. He was buried without his head, so that no one would recognize him even dead.
“He took his secret with him to the grave,” concluded Gerta.
André passed her the canteen, looking at her differently, entranced by her voice. In the light of the flames, her face shined as if it were carved in bronze, her head thrown back while she drank, her elbow lifted, pointing to the sky. A drop of water running down her chin. He believed that woman had a gift for telling stories. She was a river. Her words had tact, power of suggestion. He found himself within a halo that surrounded the campfire of twigs.
Is it possible to fall in love with a voice? Up until that moment, André had never found words to be erotic. Never had he thought that talking could be better than fucking, for example. He wasn’t very good with words. He felt they had the potential to corner him. With fucking, on the other hand, he was certain this couldn’t happen. A good conversationalist can seduce, the words leaving you on the ropes.
“You know a lot of things,” he said.
“Alexander Dumas,” she said, smiling. “I read The Vicomte de Bragelonne, when I was a teenager. It’s the third and last book of The Three Musketeers saga. Do you like to read?”
“Well, yes, but only books about war…”
“Ah…” Lifting her eyebrows in a way that suggested slight irony.
She bent over to revive the flame and André could clearly see the triangle of naked skin leading to her cleavage. Smooth, tan, clean-smelling, like saltwater, and he noticed his erection beginning to press up visibly through the fabric of his pants. He wanted to sleep with that woman. He wanted to explore her entire body, open her thighs and enter her, her thoughts, and quiet them with a kiss, and another, and another, until he changed the rhythm of her breathing. Until she could no longer think of anything. He wanted to do all of this once and for all, and stop feeling as he did, cornered by words. That night he learned a metaphor’s power of seduction. Somewhere in his head, a strumming of a guitar, so melancholic that even the rocks shuddered, began to break through.
“Good night,” she said, lifting herself up and brushing the sand from her pants.
André sat and watched her walk away. Her strong swimmer’s back, her flexible movements beneath her cotton shirt, a peculiar sway to her hips when she walked, as if slightly shifting to one side. Arrogance, pride, vanity … ancient wisdom of women who know that they’re being observed. She brought a branch from the bonfire to her mouth to light a cigarette, took a puff, and he saw her disappear below the canvas covering of the tent.
It was a time for disorder, for physical exaltation, swimming until they collapsed from fatigue on the sand, eating sardines from a can for dinner, going to sleep at the last minute, watching the line on the horizon, the sun burning the night until it disappeared over the ocean’s surface. Their heads close together, the smell of the eucalyptus, and the salt on their skin. They fell in love in the South of France—Ruth Cerf would remember later on, trying to reconstruct the fragile thread of their lives for an American journalist—they became inseparable on Île Sainte-Marguerite. A time of one world outside the world, of altered schedules, of days without a date, of gestures followed by shared laughs, complicities between them that didn’t allow room for anyone else. Willi Chardack and Raymond Gorin understood immediately. How could they not? Willi and Raymond would go back to their tents quietly at night, while Gerta and André stayed conversing in hushed voices, creating the perfect depth of field around them. There was a secret space between them. A minimum distance, like two pages in a closed book. The scar on his left brow, a blow from a stone. The vaccination mark on her arm, a half-moon precisely where the syringe shot its serum. Marking her skin years ago, in a Stuttgart school gymnasium, when she was eight years old. The list of wounds. His Achilles’ heel sticking out of the sleeping bag like an island. A prominent scar on the back of André’s hand.
“It’s my life line,” he joked. “I was born with six fingers. They removed the sixth one shortly after I was born. The midwife assured my mother that it was a sign of good luck. As you can see … it’s going to turn out she was right.”
We always fall in love with a story, not a name or a body but what is inscribed in the man.
In the shade of the eucalyptus trees, Gerta used sand to scrub the bottom of the pot they used to heat the water for the tea. The copper squeaked beneath her fingers. She was barefoot, squatting, wearing an old button-down shirt over her bathing suit. The effects of the sunlight and the great outdoors had turned the ends of her hair a shade or two blonder; there was no longer a trace of the red henna. The sun had dried up a scab on her knee that began to bleed again when she’d bent her leg. She had slipped and hurt herself on the rock moss. With her eyes, she followed the slow trail of blood running toward the instep of her foot. A striking scarlet color that the clotting darkened over the fine hairs of her skin. Without a word, he crouched down at her side, brought his mouth to her knee, and licked the blood. What he would have liked to have said he couldn’t say to a woman whose aperture was like an open wound, a youth that was not yet mortal. So he leaned forward and simply lowered his mouth to her wound. Blood. A limited depth of field. His body felt empty. The only thing that felt alive was the consciousness of his desire. How her blood had tasted would be the last thing he’d remember many years later—close to Hanoi, less than a mile away from their fort in Doai Than—during an ambush by the Viet Minh along a road loaded with mines. By then, he was no longer a boy in love but a veteran reporter with more than five wars behind him. And extremely tired of living without her.
“Come,” said Gerta, taking him by the hand.
He stood up slowly, without placing his arms around her yet, his mouth very close to hers, barely apart, but without touching, until neither one of them could stand that proximity anymore. Eyes open, fixated on one another, the last rays of sunlight filtering themselves through the leaves of the trees when he brought her to his chest, squeezing her deep, feeling her strong, elastic muscles under her blouse pulse when he covered her face with his hand and placed his salty fingers into her mouth. Arm in arm they walked to the tent, still searching for one another, craving the other with a repressed hunger, a pair of lips thirsty for the saliva and oxygen of the other pair, their teeth colliding from impatience.
“Slow down,” she said firmly, separating herself a few inches so she could breathe. Her fingers scratching the sand in André’s hair. The ocean and all its mysteries surrounding them.
He dove into her as if into the well of a grotto. Taking his time, aware, firm, without rushing, like she had asked him to. Intuitive, attentive to all of the impulses of the living body below his. Naked, smelling of young sex and the sea. Saliva. Salt. Blood. Bodily fluids that became the only necessities for being alive. From within that vertigo, she floated semiconsciously. Feeling she was about to fall from a high place. Speaking so softly, it was as if she were praying: Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai, Roi … She grabbed on to his body, pressing him down harder between her muscles, about to fall from high above, breathless. Whoever you are and wherever you are … She stared into those gorgeous Gypsy eyes and that’s when she saw him lift a hand, as if signaling for a truce. Wait, he whispered. Don’t move, stay still, please. Don’t even breathe. Teeth clenched, in total concentration, trying to regain control of his body. She could feel that he was very deep, wet from her, very hard, and remaining still. Suddenly he plunged again, slowly. This time to the hilt, even farther. Eyeing her closely as he kissed her, resisting pleasure with great difficulty. Prolonging every tremble, aware of her body, tense, moist. With every lunge the pace grew faster. Pressing up against her with more intensity, transporting her to that nonexistent place where every woman wants to be taken. Although she rejects it with her head or complains like a wounded lioness, blessing or cursing or blaspheming with her thoughts and with her eyes and with her voice. Elohim, Adonai, Roi, Olam, I’m not asking you to save me. I don’t need your blessing. He looked at her, defenseless, the way one would look at a prisoner. He kissed her on the mouth, the marrow of his bones shivering, while she finished praying, faltering, like in dreams, with words that sprouted from some hidden place within, in Yiddish … I only ask that this be real … And in that very moment, she felt him pull out and erupt at the last minute over her stomach.
“Thank you,” she said in a low voice, gently caressing his back, without specifying if it was directed at him or the Lord of Hosts, the ruler of foolish chance and of beautiful nights, the implacable legislator of causes and of their ultimate consequences, the God of Abraham and all of the Jews.