An Émigré Childhood. Opus 42. Southern England 1942.

          There was a time when skies made shadows of

          those great wings that cursed our house a midday dark,               where echoes hid a mute Heil Ludendorff!

          and La Vie Parisienne by Offenbach.

          Always the notes of Chopin’s Waltz impend. 

          Father playing, but never to the end. 

 

The dancer stumbles.

A minute later I lifted the lid to the keyboard and adjusted my piano stool.

            I have since read that seers believe that to dream of playing a piano is a favourable omen and means the discovery of something of great value in a surprising place; so I resolved to realise my dream of the night before.

            I experienced a feeling of equipoise I had not known since I last rode Dinah ... a balanced seat, hands-free, independent of the reins.

            In my opinion it is actually more difficult to run into bar 210 of Valse in A-flat Opus 42 where the waltz ‘stumbles’ than emerge from it – one runs the risk of sounding as if one has simply walked into a wall, rather than suspending the breath for a moment – hence, this artifice of ineptitude is not easy to achieve and, even though Chopin intended to simulate a clumsy dancer’s imbalance before her lost rhythm is regained, the player’s assumed clumsiness must be diligently practiced over and over again.

            So, creating this suspension requires exceptional finesse in timing and shades of dynamics and balance, which, to my way of thinking, is the more difficult task.

            In my father’s case, alas, the task was performed never with consummate success, as though the passage was a nagging regret and he had to return again and again to pick a sore.  (Father would tune his piano himself by feeding a reference note into an oscilloscope an army pal of his had once used for reading radar; he’d then retune the fifths until they were slightly flat. Those dancing waveforms on a monitor screen, as I told the doctors, I always associate with Chopin’s waltzes.)

            For my own part, my effortless arpeggiation on the evening I returned from Boy’s funeral, and my faultless span at bar 255 – which had once made such demands on the extensive stretch of my Father’s left hand – meant I rode the home-straight cooly through the flurry of that passionate coda, and reached the winning post at last, luckily without a fall ... until pent up grief all at once welled up and burst my heart.

Extract from Dispossession       

Part 11 of Sister Morphine (Salt 2008)       

 

 

For particularly recherché (even prophetic) examples of la poésie concrète likewise revealng my father’s ‘deep continent’ brand of polymathy, see The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K. and . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/circo-perfuso-fato-sanguinis.html
 

The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K are exhibited at the Arts Council Poetry Collection website administered by the Poetry Library at Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre . . .

http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordbfb6.html?id=9440 

The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K 

(1902-1939)

A Memoir of a Numeromaniacal Futurist

    

 

His Master’s Remembrancer

No man is a hero to his valet.

•

Armimas

rmimas

mimas

imas

mas

as

A protective charm against forgetfulness.

‘Obey!’ he commanded the wolfhound.

          There were only the three of us in his private quarters in our capital’s last redoubt.

          As far as the social divide was concerned he might just as well have rebuked us both.

          He had named us both ‘Wolf’. ‘In this room,’ he told us grimly, ‘there can be no Trinity!’

          (‘Nor a triumvirate,’ I thought. I understood his meaning readily enough. He despised the ineptitude of his field marshals whom he treated like waiters.)

          This was his world now – the Boss, his Dog and the Valet – an enemy-infested world that had shrunk to a fortified underground room he was content to inhabit to be spared sight of the grey hopeless distance. Besides, his eyes were intolerant to sunlight.

          He glanced at the clock, then spoke again: ‘Remind me once more, Wolf. At what hour did our great Warrior-King leave this world?’

          ‘Twenty minutes past two, my Master,’ I answered promptly. ‘1786. In the morning.’

          (The Bakelite electric clock above the steel bulkhead door read twenty-past-two. Four hours would pass before dawn.) Evidently his challenge was yet another sly test of his memory-man. (‘Cicero kept a slave,’ he had bluntly told me on the day I was appointed. ‘A mnemonist to summon up the names of plotters against Rome. A nomenclator.’)

           His love of our nation’s Great Warrior King was only matched by his love of the Roman Empire and its chronicler, Cicero.

          I saw him stoop and whisper to the dog: ‘I rather fear, my dear Wolf, that when we have more citizens than soldiers it is time to take my leave.’ (It was evident the news had reached him of mass desertions at the front. As one of my duties, I was expected to keep a tally for the Action List of names marked down for elimination as conspirators, a running total in constant dispute. The Master loathed the patrician class, particularly those who’d retained their nobiliary particle.)

          ‘Take my leave.’  It was if a sudden chill had caused me to shiver. In his talk of the death of an emperor there was clearly a terrible meaning; an acceptance that saw him bow to his own imminent dissolution. I had a comforting sense that this moment was preordained, an unalterable scheme of events that would culminate in the defeat of his Great Cause.

          For how else could it end when it was I, the Master’s valet, who had engineered his fall?

•

You might just wonder how a hexed chicken-bone can be introduced into the royally guarded sick bed of a vegetarian tyrant and Would-be Autocrat of All the World. I will tell you how.

          My hair is saxon-flaxen. My eyes are blue. So it is true, of course, that from my infancy I have passed for a member of my Master’s tribe but, then, ever since the Middle Ages, so many of the Newly Converted – the Noviter Conversis – have assumed the mantle of their inquisitors, and adopted their speech; a language which – like the Master’s bull-bellowing-orations – is often merely a turgid and mystical aggregation of words promising nothing, to which his voice easily lends itself.

          Such is the inviolable certainty of the Master’s race. Hence his diktat that the beliefs of our Outcast Elect must be reduced to the obscurity of a debased creed deserving of being wiped off the face of the earth.

          Yet do our rulers imagine that, following our distant ancestors’ enforced conversion, the secrets of the Elect were not restored to us in our cradles even while the recusant Elders perished within their walled Settlements of Exclusion? Let me confess: the prepotent words of ancient and secret ordinances, conjurations and maledictions, still echo in our blood from birth. For I, who had received the slave’s portion, had received a greater gift.

          ‘As fast as the throbbing progresses,’ the Master had grated, nursing his left hand, ‘as quickly my flesh withers.’ He had cut an abject figure. A pained smile, his face blueish-grey.

          He could not have known that my people for centuries have regarded all sleep as a perilous state since the unguarded body is peculiarly open to attack by demon-magic.

          That the Master’s vanity could be flattered by my demonic stratagems can be understood only when you consider that many ladies of the arts, particularly young movie starlets, pursued him with shamelessly seductive love letters often clipped to glossy publicity stills of their posing as come-hither ingénues in popular celluloid froth for the masses.

          Naturally, I considered it my duty to intercept such importunities.  

          For it was one of these cris de cœur that lent credence to my subterfuge: ‘I love you, my Emperor, and want to be with you always in the joy of your divine-anointed future. My heart bursts with the ardency of my respect for you, etc.’ The letter with a single rose, its stem embellished with a red silk ribbon, I placed on the pillow of the Master’s bed.

          A pullet’s bone had been concealed within the ribbon’s folds, a charm against evil men invested with our most powerful necromancy. I’d performed the prescribed forty-two repetitive adjurations over that hollow bone in which a louse, teased from the wolfhound’s bedding, had been imprisoned.

          When the Master uncovered the rose and letter beneath his counterpane, his gaunt cheeks were seen to be singularly flushed in a patchy, unnatural way, yet the tributes remained untouched because that night the profound sleep of beseeched misfortune at once overtook him.

          The next morning an early dispatch informed the Master of incalculable casualties on the Eastern Front as his armies retreated pursued by a massive counteroffensive.

•

Ours was once an enslaved people so the Ancients tell us and, from that morning, the ineffaceable suffering in my life – as another Androcles – intensified under the brute I served.

          Whereas it is not exactly a case of putting one’s head into a lion’s mouth, it is too near for absolute peace of mind when at close quarters one is required to apply mortician’s greasepaint to the Master’s sunken cheeks to evince a counterfeit bloom.

          It was the face not of an individual; it was the face of an entire nation, seen on postage stamps.

          That face was now rigid. Sweat beaded his forehead and his limbs pulsed with a sharp acrid smell. A bestial stink.

          Day and night, deep below on Sub-level Four, I was caged with this totem. On the increasingly rare occasions he ventured out in his armoured car to view the ruined city, the warning signs that reminded him The Enemy is Listening seemed only to prolong his caged paranoia.

          Things come apart precipitately when they are held together by lies. So when they learned the Eastern Front was held by broken promises the ranks fell apart.

•

Not all occasions are equal for the efficacy of a curse. I chose carefully the hour when the stars favoured me to call down a curse on this loathsome man.

          The Master’s voice had the charm of Satan; he’d oil his voice with a glass of clear honey, glycerin and water. My duty was to prepare the mixture he’d gargle before his speeches.  In accordance with the cabbalistic rituals of our fabled mystics, before the glass was filled the seven signs of seven were written in honey on the inside of the glass while the given invocation was recited.

          The next day, for the first time, his left arm began the violent twitching with which henceforth he would be afflicted, while the tremors in his hands were more pronounced, his lips quivered, and his left eyebrow was gripped by a persistent nervous tic.

          Consider. Were not the tremors of his hands the mark of Cain, mankind’s First Murderer and likewise a vegetarian? Thereafter, in public, the Master would hold a pair of gloves, grasping his left hand to conceal the infirmity rendered by my sorcery.

          Such was the ground I had prepared for the Master’s downfall. Nothing sharpens the mind like a condemned cell. That it was a conspiracy of one against the powers of evil and entirely dependent on my own acts and devices is an historical fact.

•

Behind me, from his desk, I heard an almost inappreciable indrawn breath, a sound I recognized as a cue preparatory to speech, as if something had just occurred to him.

          So I turned at the door.

          ‘Don’t you know it’s unlucky to turn back?’ The Master was smiling with a sickening glazed look; the sort of cynical smile you see on the face of the dead.

          ‘Have you a revolver?’ The words were hardly audible.

          Before I could answer he went on:

          ‘Take mine.’

          He looked round him as a person looks round a room before starting on a long journey to remember all he leaves behind.

          He fondled the muzzle of his dog. (His breath was fouler than Wolf’s when scavenging the old winter garden, now overrun with willow herb and nettles.)

          ‘His life will be nothing without me.’

          I stretched out my hand and took the revolver, which was of an unfamiliar pattern. I made up my mind to shoot Wolf at once. 

          ‘The quietus will seem from my own hand, you understand.’ The words were pronounced by a tyrant who issued orders that sent thousands to their deaths. Even in this extremity he was shooting from someone else’s shoulder; demanding I do his dirty work without compunction, as though I were simply another thuggish condottiere from his elite death squad.

          He half rose in his chair to unlock a drawer. I saw his own service revolver reposed within. He withdrew a leather-bound cigarette case, which he opened and extended to me.

          (I curbed a start of surprise. Famously, the Master neither took strong drink nor smoked.)

          The cigarette case revealed a dozen glass ampoules packed in sawdust.           

          ‘Take one.’ He lowered his voice.

          Often – so very often – I wanted to cram glowing ashes into my mouth rather than answer with the expected rote assent: ‘Very good, my Master,’ or ‘As the Master pleases,’ regardless of the task he ordained.

          I smartly placed the cyanide vial in my tunic breast pocket. I noticed the master was – unusually for this early hour – wearing service dress, yet such was his physical decline the uniform was now a poor fit. His trousers hung on him; in the first week of my appointment, I had been commended for introducing knife-edge sewn-in creases to spruce up his turnout.

          On his left breast the Master wore his Medal for Valour, awarded for distinguished service when a corporal. Beneath the medal was pinned his gold Party badge, member Number One. It was whispered a misfortune had befallen the original owner of this coveted membership number, which had been reassigned to the Master. His rival for first place, we heard, had been ‘administratively exiled’ to a Detention Camp for Political Education.

          As it was, I was haunted by my recollection of sewing that uniform with thread moistened by my own heathenish spittle, every stitch counted according to a numeromancy older than the Witch of Endor and her demon familiars.

          And, yes, it’s true the Master did indeed shoot himself that morning but, if I am to be believed, he died by my own hand; the hand that threaded the fatal needle because, you see, the day was chosen. A Monday it was, remember, a day especially opportune for blood-letting.

          The Master’s last words to me?

          ‘We are now willed to flourish from the ashes, free of our infantile servitude to the People’s legends from the Old Dispensation. The new man must fight for the New Order, Wolf.’

          ‘I give my word,’ I answered glibly, ‘as freely as my life is given,’ repeating the pledge that had bound me to this barbarian for seven long years (and in my mind I rehearsed again its curiously equivocal deniability).

          (‘There has now risen a new authority as to who our Redeemer is,’ his Minister for Spiritual Reform had once explained to me. ‘This new authority is our Master.’)

          The Master clasped and unclasped his hands without thought, a sure sign of his bodily pain. His eyes glittered with rheum. His teeth were resolutely clenched and he pressed his abdomen while feigning to adjust his waistband.

          His inflammatory bowel complaint was first defined by a brilliant gastroenterologist, regrettably a remote lineal descendant of one of our recusant Elders, with whose name the discovery would be for ever linked. The Master refused to utter the physician’s name. He called his gastrointestinal affliction his Vulcanitis (even his own pathology he made the stuff of Olympian myths).

          The Master was a delusional case. How desperate was his search for panaceas, to my mind, may be measured by his craven submission to the remedies of a crank dietician who, ever since our incarceration in the redoubt, had prescribed a treatment of crushed nettles in an infusion, fetched daily from a makeshift dispensary at Sub-level Two in one of the fortress’s surviving cellars.

          It was to this dispensary that I now withdrew, the wolfhound close on my heels.

          One of my tasks had been the supply of fresh nettles from the winter garden for steeping in a field water cask. I would pour the foul-smelling potion from its brass spigot into the Master’s carafe to be taken as a tincture.

          The Master believed the decoction fired up his rhetoric. He was fond of repeating a folk saying well known in our language: ‘My words, like nettles, sting only those who are incautious.’

        (He had touched my arm at our parting. ‘And when I give my word, I am in the habit of keeping it.’ A moment later a faint gunshot was heard confined by the door I had just closed behind me.)

          I took Wolf by the leash and scrambled up the service access shaft that connected the dispensary to the surface where the entrance was concealed by a cunningly disguised trapdoor professing to be a commemorative slab dedicated to a long-lived empress whose baroque belvedere pavilion collapsed on the Ides of March on the same spot following the great hurricane of 1876.

          (Even then, if truth be told, it was borne in on me that the meretricious convolutions of the Master’s overwrought speeches were no less baroque than his nation’s florid civic splendour now laid waste under the relentless carpet bombing dealt by his enemy’s superior firepower . . . and, indeed, that both floridities were now no more than so much scorched earth few could deny.)

          Wolf surged ahead, teeth bared, bristling with unease, as we emerged hidden by a clump of nettles into a smoke-shrouded dawn. The last boom of our guns defending the city was like the slamming shut of a prison door on our freedom; we were besieged. A hail of returning shell and mortar fire caused us to draw back to seek refuge in the crater of a half-toppled obelisk that mocked the remains of the garden colonnade.

          Ahead of us machine-guns stuttered and a breach in the outworks appeared, lit up by signal flares. I was assailed by the stench of machines and smoke and fell back oppressed, faint from intimations of my destiny, while headlong through the opening burst a host of messenger-angels – incorporeal, transcendent – clothed in the pure white samite raiment predicted by our prophets.

•

Comrade Wolf!’ was their first greeting. There were yells of wild laughter when Wolf slipped the leash and the platoon leader deftly caught him.

            As they came near, I saw the invaders were cradling sub-machine guns half-concealed by their white capes; evidently their advance from the snowbound Eastern Front had been so rapid their winter service uniforms were all they had: fleece caps, belted sheepskin coats or white quilted jackets.

            Broad faces. Cheekbones as though hacked out of ice. Nearly all were marked by some disfigurement, a record written on them of fatal combat where frostbite was no less cruel a foe.

            Yet, astonishingly, they clapped me on the back and chorused, ‘Wolf! Wolf!’

            It was thanks to the Party’s ultra-demagogic Minister of Information that Wolf was more renowned than Rin Tin Tin.

            We were celebrities. So, of course, they – those guileless white-clad victors – delivered us as valued trophies to their own feared despot and for a gilded hour they were heroes.

•

‘I did not inherit my throne,’ my new master boasts with a slippery flippancy, ‘I was chosen.’

            Again we have fallen on evil days. For now Wolf, too, has a new master.

            Our new owner is, indeed, of a New Order. He is the Supreme Leader of the new World Order and rules half the hemisphere. Truly, my former Master had espoused the Great Cause to see his arch-enemy vanquished, yet this victorious peasant-faced Man of the People, at a stroke, has seized the ideological high ground.

            Under his peasant heel, the Master’s fatherland has been damned a vassal state. And I? My fate is to be the Supreme Leader’s valet, installed in a new reptile house.

            (Once, once, I had dreamt of a time when I’d be granted a great estate such as that bestowed by our Warrior-King in 1740 on his valet, the son of a peasant. Now my eyes have been opened. Am I to be ever cursed a Gibeonite, and never cease to be a slave?)

            The Supreme Leader is a man, so far as I can see, of no particular distinction. From the way I see it, he fails to apprehend what is important and what is not. That will be his undoing.

            His time will come.

            He wears with relish my gold watch, the watch with a personal inscription the Master had presented to me. The defeated ruler’s favorite slave, too, becomes the trophy of a conqueror.

            Now I live lower than dirt; below, in the basement area, under the arch of the steps that lead to the Supreme Leader’s grand front door. Of his mute slaves there is not one who does not fear their hell-bent ruler and quake at his tread. 

            Many times, on his approach, the monster bawls my name; stamps a tantrum at his door to bid his prized drudge: ‘Take off my boots!’ 

            And there, on that doorstep, so near above my head, there at that boot scraper, under his tyrant heel he stamps out the dirt while I, his bootblack, suffer his taunts to bear all the cold earth, all the cold earth he rains down to mire my hair. 

          Ranting. Ever stomping to defile my hair.

          I am Absalom, my golden hair caught in a thicket of my own trickery.

          The Supreme Leader’s promises are ruinous. In time, he too will learn.

          There shall be more conjurations. More maledictions.

          Misfortune seldom comes alone to a house.

•

Ochnotinos

chnotinos

notinos

otinos

tinos

inos

nos

os

A protective charm against the deliriums of fever.

•

Keeping accounts does not necessarily mean one settles them. 

© Catherine Isolde Eisner 2023

•

See also: A fervent proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany. Between life and death, January 14 1944. Poet Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast.
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html 

See also: Correction Notice, Soviet Weekly January 17 1946 . . . an ‘Exchange of Information’ Restored.

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/09/correction-notice-soviet-weekly-january.html 

Lower than dirt

Once I lived lower than dirt; below,
in the basement area,

under the steps to my master’s front door.

I would dread his return
from the brickyards where
of those mute slaves 
there was not one who did not fear
their hellbent master
and quake at his tread.

Many times, on his approach, 
the brute would bawl my name;
stamp a tantrum at his door
to bid his craven drudge:
‘Take off my boots!’

And there, on that door step,

so near above my head,
there at that boot scraper,
under his tyrant heel

he stamps out the dirt
while I, his bootblack,  
suffer his taunts to bear 
all the cold earth

all the cold earth
he rains down
 to mire my hair.

Ranting.
Ever stomping
to mire my hair.

Until the day I fled away
and seven years passed before
the Time of Rain and Retribution brought
a brown mudslide to bury 
all the master’s works:

the city 

the brickyard

his house

he had built to
last a thousand years.

Misfortune seldom comes alone to a house.

                                             Catherine Eisner             

                                    25.01.2019             

   

For the photograph of the 19th Century boot scraper that lends substance to this text we are indebted to the documentarian, Areta, and her fascinating explorations of the former Austrian empire in her scholarly website:

http://forgottengalicia.com/

Oderint dum metuant*

             Though endlessly in his City of Stone

             From every corner of the Boulevards

             His voice is yammering from his Hectorphone

             He cannot awake his petrified guards.

* ‘Let them hate, so long as they fear.’ (Attributed to Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Roman emperor, AD 37–41, otherwise ‘Caligula’.)

Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’

I have mentioned here and there, somewhat tangentially, the dilemma of my German-born father, accused by his sister in a fierce letter from Berlin (November 17, 1929) of becoming a stereotypical arch-Englishman (Stock-Engländer).
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-are-all-vermin-now.html 

Inevitably, these emotional complexities were compounded by the outbreak of war in 1939, though by that date (September 3 1939) my father had been in the Territorials for more than a year. As I have also intimated, his rôle during the war in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) was concerned with the military intelligence to be derived from the closest scrutiny of captured enemy documents, the specialism of the G-2 Documents Section . . . ephemera such as identification papers, Promotions Lists, Casualty Reports, Soldbücher (see below), Travel Orders, photos, notebooks, and captured enemy letters, generally seized unopened at a Feldpost.

The judicious release to the Allied press of enemy propaganda of the vilest sort was also part of his duties. I have, locked away in my plan-chest, a black museum of the most monstrous anti-Semitic propaganda imaginable, a collection my father amassed at G-2.

I have mentioned also that my father was an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials. No doubt the documents in the files I now possess relate to the trials of those war criminals. Certainly, my father retained signed orders from the most notorious of the accused, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel. Here are their signatures . . .

Out of the blue,  late last year,  my sister dropped by with a number of additional documents relating to my father . . . in particular,  a most illuminating (albeit rather stilted) letter to his former peacetime employers in London written from Paris, exactly two months after the liberation of the city . . .

Speer & Hitler, Paris, June 1940 (Keitel, left, Bormann, right)

October 31st 1944
G-2 Division
SHAEF

. . . As you may have gathered from the envelope I am now overseas. Colossal strides have been made if one recalls some of the milestones of the war since that memorable day when we Territorials quite suddenly had to break off in the middle of what ever we happened to be doing and rush to man our respective posts as soldiers.

The Battle of Britain with which most of us are only too familiar; the exploits in Africa where the enemy despite crafty leadership was outwitted and in the end successfully routed; the heroic defence of Stalingrad and the gigantic offensives launched by Russia, with their implications for the subsequent course of the war and on Allied strategy; the first major assault on the European mainland in Italy resulting in the capitulation of the first Axis power; the overwhelming success of the long awaited invasion of the Continent on the heavily defended coast of France; the liberation of peoples from the yoke of oppression. Now, at last, the Allies have set foot on German soil. What a formidable record!

It would be imprudent to hazard a guess when it will all be over; however, judging by the stiffening of resistance, due, no doubt, both to coercion and the diabolical exploitation of every conceivable morale-bolstering device in the vain attempt to frustrate what must be a foregone conclusion, it may mean to a great extent razing down to the ground the domain of a sadly misguided people until the erstwhile mighty Nazi stronghold has been completely crumbled. While not forgetting the task in hand is far from completed one cannot escape the thought that all of this will have been accomplished not without a price which must never be forgotten by those who through Providence may be permitted to return. Upon them in particular will devolve the onerous responsibility effectively to contribute – by steering well clear of such extremes as political apathy and Chauvinism – to the shaping of a new world era from which the spectre of war will be banished for all times.

Nightmare scenes of destruction.  

It has been my privilege to see many of the historic places in Normandy where not so very long ago fierce battles raged, such as Bayeux, Caen, Carentan, Évreux, Isigny, Lisieux, etc, and to share to some extent in the rejoicing of a people who have once again regained their freedom. If one happens to venture along some French streets, it is touching to be surrounded by children who in their innocence seek to express gratitude for something of which they are only dimly conscious by eagerly seizing your hand and muttering ‘Merci’ or even ‘Thank You’. Not without a feeling of awe does one cross bridges still crudely labelled with names which have gone down into history. The ferocity of the contest is brought home to the onlooker by scenes of destruction and devastation unlikely to occur even in a nightmare. Yet amid these ruins courageous people still dwell and go about their daily business. To heighten the incongruity these places are gaily bedecked with flags, bunting and signs expressing thanks and a welcome to the liberators. While travelling along the open roads one may encounter numerous disabled or burnt-out tanks lined up alongside, and frequent concentrations of craters testify to the strafing of a convoy; moreover, many fragments of wrecked planes clearly showing Swastika markings may be discerned in the fields as one drives by, and now and again a new cemetery symmetrically laid out with countless uniform crosses.

Faded flowers and chips in the masonry.  

Last, but by no means least I, have been to that historic bone of contention named Versailles and to the mecca of the Americans: PARIS. From the fashion point of view, I am bound to remark that the female of the species still goes around extremely well dressed despite sartorial shortages of different kinds and I am confounded more often than not by the monstrous headgear which appears to be in vogue at the moment. When I think that only fairly recently I was still in my own home, especially on that day when General de Gaulle entered Paris, listening to the excited commentator describing the dramatic entry into Notre Dame, it is certainly thrilling to be able to write and say one has been there and, among other places, in the Place de la Concorde where signs of the barricades and chips in the masonry continue to tell their story. In fact, other visible evidence of the former Occupation has not yet been completely effaced either. Countless German inscriptions on buildings, signs and even on big posters may still be seen. A more tragic note was struck when in a lonely street on a fence I observed a piece of cardboard recording in crude handwriting that on a certain date some Frenchmen had been assassinated on that spot by the ‘Boches’. No more and no less, except for a bunch of faded flowers still wrapped in paper dangling from a piece of string surmounting the sign.

Flourishing black market.  

Apart from the congested travel on the ‘Metro’ and on a few isolated ’bus services, life in the great capital seems to be fairly normal so far as I can judge. The cafés and a good many places of entertainment appear to be in full swing. People are manifestly pleased with the change liberation has brought them, and many a harrowing tale has been related to me of sufferings and privations which had formerly to be contended with. Prices in the shops are exceedingly high compared with ours, especially at the present rate of exchange. It may perhaps be attributed to the flourishing state of black market activities and possibly still to the earlier rate of exchange fixed by the Germans, which I understand was approximately 16–24 francs to 1 Reichemark, thus enabling them to buy up as much as they cared  At the arbitrary rate of francs 10 = shilling 1/-, or £ = frs 200, Allied policy obviously wishes to discourage military personnel from making purchases in order not to deprive the indigenous population of their rightful commodities. In this connection I must relate an incident which I shall always remember.

Lost appetite.

On the occasion of a visit to Paris after a strenuous morning sightseeing the inner man asserted himself with particular vehemence. Not realising the prevailing conditions and carrying on my person the equivalent of approximately £2 I had no compunction in entering what seemed to be a restaurant of modern pretensions. I partook of a most enjoyable meal and just regretted the absence of potatoes with my main dish only to find that they were served afterwards as a separate course! A Frenchman sitting nearby who had consumed much along the same lines as I, had meanwhile finished and asked for the bill. He took out his wallet and to my ever-growing astonishment counted out a vast number of notes which I saw were of Francs 100 denomination. My appetite thereupon dwindled rapidly and I must confess to feelings of great trepidation when with a shaky voice I eventually mustered sufficient courage to demand l’addition. To my surprise the waitress summoned the proprietress who came to my table and harangued me in a pretty little speech to the effect that I was the first soldier of the Anglo-American forces to enter her restaurant and that in no circumstances would she accept payment from me. I was utterly dumbfounded for the moment and after muttering not too emphatic expressions of reluctance to accept her offer I managed to say that I respected her sentiments and would she in the circumstances do me the honour to accept a packet of cigarettes which I knew were at a premium in Paris. With faint protestations she too decided to acquiesce whereupon with a sensation of great relief I sallied forth into the street, leaving with great magnanimity a tip equivalent to 5 shillings in our currency representing but a tiny fraction of what my meal should have cost me! 

Stand-in Germans.  

[Real names suppressed.] It with a sense of deep gratitude at being able, if only in trifling measure, to reciprocate the firm’s tangible goodwill to the militant members of staff that I now come to report on my visit to the Paris branch office. I had hoped to be the first British representative of the firm to cross their threshold since the Occupation, but I learned that I had been forestalled by a Major ‘J’ whom I cannot place. The only ‘J’ I knew was taken prisoner at beginning of the war. The Major ‘J’ in question is supposed to be a very able linguist and though this applies also to the young man I knew, there is still a discrepancy of age as I understand Major ‘J’ is about 50. When I paid my first visit to the Rue Rodier I made the acquaintance of a Monsieur ‘M’, whom I assume to be the manager, and in the absence of both M. Rosenberg and Mr ‘H’, he was good enough to answer the various questions I raised in the course of quite a long conversation . . . During the occupation the firm was in the charge of two Germans in all, one at a time over different periods, who supervised the business. They were supposed to have been very capable, extremely correct in their dealings, and drew only a nominal salary of frs 2,000 per month. 

Anti-Semitic measures enforced. 

Naturally, I enquired after M. Rosenberg and I was told that he had been in during the morning and was not expected to return that day. It was not possible to reach him on the ’phone as this was still cut off as a result of the anti-Semitic measures enforced during the Occupation. Mr ‘H’, I was given to understand, had been interned in Vittel [concentration camp in the Vosges department,  where US or British citizens were interned] and had only returned the night before. Monsieur ‘M’ managed to get through to him on the ’phone eventually and I was invited to call on him at his home. There I also met Mrs ‘H’ and we all had tea together. I must say that for his age he look remarkably well and fit and really showed no signs on the ordeal he had just been through. As I happened to be among the first to see him, even before he had been able to see M. Rosenberg, there was nothing much he could say beyond express his intention to look up his contacts.  

A true Frenchman. 

Meanwhile, it has been my good fortune to pay another visit to Paris and this time I managed to see both M. Rosenberg and Mr ‘H’. M. Rosenberg was very charming indeed and I was profoundly moved by his dignified composure when I consider the infinite mental anguish and physical suffering it has been his lot to endure. Though I gather from Monsieur ‘M’ that he has aged considerably, his bearing was agile and his speech lacks none of the sparkle and animation associated with a true Frenchman. He expressed his satisfaction so far as business matters were concerned and regarded it as a major miracle to be able to report that the firm had lost no money despite having been under German control for so many years.
[END of my father’s Letter extracts.]

A booby-trapped piano. 

The routed enemy knew about human weakness, my father told me, particularly how liberating troops would eagerly go after for souvenirs. It was these items that the retreating Germans booby-trapped in France . . . he said you should never pick up helmets, rifles, thermos flasks or cameras left behind in enemy billets, because these could trigger trip-wires connected to igniting devices intended to dynamite souvenir hunters to shreds.  

Resist the fatal impulse to pry, he was warned. Igniting devices could be left in the piano, the closet, the stove, the icebox, behind pictures, beneath dishes and flower bowls or even in a chamber pot underneath the bed . . . or . . .
  

Mid Sussex Times, August 9 1944.

As I have recorded elsewhere, my father was a gifted pianist who studied in Vienna and the Institute of Musical Art, New York. We can imagine, then – in that Paris autumn of 1944 – how his strong desire to run his fingers once again over the keyboard of a splendid grand piano, the centrepiece of a fashionable salon lately abandoned by German officers, was almost his undoing,  . . . had he pressed one piano-key, he told me, he could have tripped the enemy’s surprise package and blown his outfit into kingdom come.

In my writings, my sketches of my father as a pianist are rare, but here, below, is a quotation that describes his postwar manner, which was undoubtedly conditioned by his struggle to resolve the crisis of a divided identity, which would in the late 1940s lead to a troubled crack-up. At that time, specialists had concluded that the confusion associated with my father’s disrupted identity was the result of psychological stresses underlying his bilingualism. That there was a higher incidence of mental disturbances among polyglots, the shrinks claimed, was evidence of the trauma of assimilation.

In my opinion it is actually more difficult to run into bar 210 of Valse in A-flat Opus 42 where the waltz ‘stumbles’ than emerge from it – one runs the risk of sounding as if one has simply walked into a wall, rather than suspending the breath for a moment – hence, this artifice of ineptitude is not easy to achieve and, even though Chopin intended to simulate a clumsy dancer’s imbalance before her lost rhythm is regained, the player’s assumed clumsiness must be diligently practiced over and over again.
     So, creating this suspension requires exceptional finesse in timing and shades of dynamics and balance, which, to my way of thinking, is the more difficult task.
     In my father’s case, alas, the task was performed never with consummate success, as though the passage was a nagging regret and he had to return again and again to pick a sore.  (Father would tune his piano himself by feeding a reference note into an oscilloscope an army pal of his had once used for reading radar; he’d then retune the fifths until they were slightly flat. Those dancing waveforms on a monitor screen, as I told the doctors, I always associate with Chopin’s waltzes.) 

This extract is from the episode, Dispossession, in my Sister Morphine (Salt 2008) . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 

For a tragedy of true alienation, see also my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library. . .
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=9440