Day off. Unusually, not at home. Tending to the cat of a colleague who’s away for a few days at some sort of bush rave. Who knew such things happened? Better him than me. Writing this on his couch. Frances — the cat — usually pretty stand-offish with strangers, which suits me fine. Bring out a laptop, however, and place it on the place where the designation “laptop” suggests placement is proper, and she senses the emergence of a rival who must be expelled from the kingdom. Fending her off with elbows, also by highlighting for her the two Mavis Gallant (MG) stories I can call to mind — “The Moslem Wife,” “An Unmarried Man’s Summer “— in which cats come to grief. Probably there are others. She seems unmoved. Am sometimes tempted to get a cat, if only for the pleasure of naming it Mavis, and am glad of this reminder of what having one on hand — on lap — actually involves. My pet keeping days are done. Famous last words. Cats are like cigarettes. You think you’re over them, but all it takes is one moment of weakness and your lungs are black sacks of contaminants.
Cats are opportunists — Frances will put up with me because I have opposable thumbs and can open her tins of fetid grub and shovel out her litter box — but they aren’t indifferent — it’s clear to me that she knows who her daddy is, and it ain’t me. My being here only underscores his absence. Emptiness doesn’t draw attention to itself, that’s its nature. It’s only when something comes along to colour the void that you realize where you’ve been. (It is owing to profound insights exactly like this that I work as a grocery clerk.) Happened to hear a robin the other morning and realized that that cheerful song — anthropomorphism at work, how do I know whether it’s cheerful, it’s probably more a register of desperation or anxiety than anything — and realized that it was now aberrant, that the chorus that had enlivened my pre-dawn writing had, by and large, stopped. But when? A week ago? Ten days back? The fledglings must be out of the nest, now, the speckles on their breasts loosing identity, joining forces, turning a uniform red. The new sparrows became visible a couple of weeks back, you could see them in their numbers all up and down the alley, looking nervously around, glancing over what passes for their shoulders, scrabbling away in the gravel and dust. Some were built to last, others not. Now, the survivors look like hardened toughs. Gang members. The first new crows of the season, a little later to emerge, are teetering on porch railings, on wires, class clowns in the making. The new geese, having shed all traces of goslingness, are trying out for chevron leader — not that they have any need to migrate from a place where they can just hang out on the beach all winter — and the baby gulls, likewise, are packing for college, the ones that haven’t been scooped up by the eagles that patrol the skies every afternoon, round about happy hour time, always pursued by the guardian gulls who know exactly what that seemingly leisurely riding of the currents portends.
I’ve been aware, in the last couple of weeks, in the store, a more than usual number of women in advanced stages of gravidity. “More than usual,” of course, pertains only to what I’m seeing, not to anything that might be real, actual, statistically verifiable. No doubt the population of pregnant women hasn’t surged unaccountably, no doubt it conforms to an average. These visible exploitations of fecundity’s ripe possibilities — not just in the store, but out and about in the world — make me wonder not so much whether there actually is an uptick of buns in ovens, but more whether I’m somehow predisposed to notice it in this, my own birth month. Maybe there’s something deep, something atavistic and tribal that makes me want to urge on the arrival of new members of the Leo Team. Induce, ladies! Induce! You’ve only got a few more weeks and then you’re into Virgo territory! Danger, Will Robinson, danger! Oh, Virgos. They’re all fine and dandy if what you want is someone on hand to organize your files.
I am saying quite a lot of nothing. Delaying tactics. That’s what I’m practicing here. I’ve been putting off finishing the story of Heinz Thaufelder that I began on August 1. I know his name only because he has the credit for the photo of MG that appeared on the back cover of My Heart is Broken.
It really is a great photo. She looks like a partner in the firm of Candour and Glamour. Who does she resemble? Not so much Ava Gardner or Yvonne de Carlo — it’s their Centennial year, too; maybe more Simone Signoret, b. 1921.
I wondered — reasonably, I think — who Heinz Thaufelder was in the world and who he was to MG. Whoever one day writes her biography, whoever has access to her diaries, and whatever part of her vast correspondence might be available, will tell that story. (I’ve said before and I’ll say again that if I’ve done nothing here other than call attention to the absence, almost a decade after her death, of a full account of her remarkable life — each passing year bringing about the inevitable winnowing of the primary sources — my work will have been worthwhile.) I know a little bit more about Heinz and MG than it’s my place or purpose here to divulge, but only a little bit. In the following I’ll betray no confidences, only draw attention to what anyone can find in the record her own published writing. Whatever the full scope of their relationship, Heinz was, in part, an important source of information for her project, which she outlined in the 1977 interview she gave to Geoff Hancock. Here she speaks of how, at 22, working at the Montreal Standard, she saw the first photos to come out of the liberated camps: the emaciated survivors, the piles of the dead.
What I wrote and thought at twenty-two I think and believe now. I wrote, then, that the victims, the survivors that is, would probably not be able to tell us anything, except for the description of life at point zero. It we wanted to find out how and why this happened, it was the Germans we had to question. There was hardly a culture or a civilization I would have placed as high as the German.
MG, given German lessons as a child, inherited, via her mother, a bloodline that was Germanic and, in some percentage that would not have counted in her favour under the perverse parsing of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws, Jewish. Her fascination with the German national conscience — if such a thing can be said to exist — after the war, makes perfect sense, and is the animating force that powers the stories in The Pegnitz Junction (1973) and several others, published in The New Yorker in the early 60’s, and gathered many years later in such collections as The Cost of Living or In Transit.
In 1989, the Canadian novelist and editor James Bacque (1929 - 2019) published what proved to be a highly controversial book, Other Losses.
The allied occupying forces, Bacque contends, the Americans at the foremost, were responsible for creating conditions, in compounds hastily built to contain enemy combatants, that led to deaths, from disease or starvation, of hundreds of thousand of German POW’s. This is about as bald a summation of his detailed account as could be given, and while some heralded the book as a necessary expose of a shocking and untold chapter in the history of the Second World War, his findings were also challenged and refuted — debunked, really — by many scholars. I suspect that some lay readers might have responded to his disclosures, even if they accepted them as fact, with a shrug that said, “They got what they deserved;” the conditions Bacque describes might have been those in the concentration camps, minus the gas chambers and the ovens. The reception history of Other Losses is its own absorbing study, but is not my concern here. What interests me is an index entry: T., Heinz, 39 - 41, 65, 119, 141. (The page numbers refer to the Futura paperback, published 1990.) Bacque adds a footnote on p. 39 saying that Heinz T.’s full identity has been withheld at H. T.’s request. In the endnotes to that chapter, he reports, “Author’s interview with Heinz T., together with Mavis Gallant, Paris, June, 1986.”
Heinz had just turned 18, was in an army hospital, when he was captured by American forces and transferred to a vast encampment at Bad Kreuznach. He was wearing shorts, shoes, a shirt. Nothing else was provided. No shelter, very little food, uncertain water. They slept were they could, ate grass, used improvised latrines. His feet grew swollen. He removed his shoes, used them as a pillow. The shoes were stolen. After about a month, along with perhaps a million other prisoners — Bacque says the number might have been much higher — he was given to the French, part of a slave labour arrangement to accommodate the rebuilding of infrastructure destroyed during the war. Here are a few interesting — as I find them — correspondences between Heinz T’s testimony — as related to James Bacque via MG — and a few of MG’s German-themed stories. Those that seem particularly germane are “Willi,” “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” “The Report,” “The Latehomecomer,” “Baum, Gabriel (1935 -),” and “Ernst in Civilian Clothes.” “Ernst” is doubly eerie, in that it appeared in The New Yorker that would shave been on newsstands when JFK was assassinated, or just before, and the story is set, very specifically — can someone say for what reason? — on January 28, 1963: the coldest winter on record since 1880, the same winter Sylvia Plath endured in London, writing the poems in Ariel, and then taking her own life, not living to see how influential they would become, likewise the just-published The Bell Jar, which is so suffused by the writing of MG, in Green Sky Green Water.
The Americans were really shitty to us, said Heinz T. Other Losses
He does not know why the Americans who took him prisoner in Germany sent him to France. Ernst in Civilian Clothes
I had been in a prisoner-of-war camp in Rennes when an order arrived to repatriate everyone who was under eighteen. For some reason, my name was never called. The Late Homecomer
I had only one piece of ID showing my birthdate, 1927. I thought they might release me if they thought I was only 16, so I changed the seven to a nine, but it made no difference. Heinz T. Other Losses
The document has it that he is Ernst Zimmerman, born in 1927, in Mainz. … He was really born in the Voralberg, in 1929. Ernst in Civilian Clothes
We stayed at Rennes almost eight months. In those months we understood why we had been brought to France. France needed soldiers. … The soldiers who did join the Foreign Legion were put in another camp nearby where we could see them, and in a couple of weeks they were well fed and looked stronger. Heinz T. Other Losses
When Willi was released from prison camp, and after he became disgusted with home, he thought he might join the Foreign Legion. He is glad he didn’t now. Willi’s friend Ernst did join; he was sick of being a prisoner and it was the only way out. Willi
When he joined the Legion, he said he was eighteen, for there were advantages in both error and accuracy, then; prisoners under eighteen received double food rations… Ernst in Civilian Clothes
My friends in the camp who were older wrote to my parents when they got back to Germany and they said I was incredibly cheerful and that I had raised their spirits because I was not depressed. Heinz T. Other Losses
Good-natured Willi danced a java this morning with an imaginary girl in his arms. Fortunately, he had no partner, for she would have been kicked to bits. Ernst in Civilian Clothes.
I understood we were in for a long time and everyone has his own defence system so I said to myself OK, we’re making a film, it’s captivity, I am an actor, so I can get out when I want but I won’t be paid so I’ll stay in for the whole thing. As I had done a bit of acting in youth films in Berlin I knew a little bit how it worked so I said that’s what it was. Heinz T. Other Losses
When they need technical advice in films about the Occupation, they often send for Willi. Willi
Etc. If you have the time or patience to read for yourselves, you’ll find many such Venn diagram intersections.
Whether or not Heinz Thaufelder, in Paris after the war, got by as Willi does in “Willi,” in Ernst in Civilian Clothes, and in “A Report,” as do a number of characters in “Baum, Gabriel (1935-)” — that’s to say by typing translations for a few centimes a page, helping souvenir collectors and cosplay enthusiasts with WW II re-enactments, working as a tour guide for German businessmen who want to see the sights and then get dropped off in Pigalle, working as a technical advisor or background performer in TV shows and movies with Occupation settings — I can’t say. Yes, would be my cautious guess. Nor would I know if Heinz, like Stefan in “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” leaves his university laboratory and joins a student protest about which he feels more than a bit ambivalent; in this regard, Stefan certainly sounds very much like the H. T MG describes in her account of the Paris uprising in 1968 — again, this is noted in the diary entry for August 1.
What I’ve built here, no one needs tell me, is a very small hill of beans. It says little and it proves nothing. What it demonstrates — hints at, more accurately — is how, in certain instances, MG’s long period of apprenticeship as a journalist was a training ground for her true avocation as a fiction writer. Nothing comes from nothing. Experience, observation, the passage of time, memory, imagination: those are fiction’s snips and snails and puppy dog tails. So says I. MG came to Europe in the years after the war. She came to Paris because it was Paris, and came to Europe because it was a smouldering heap and she wanted to understand something of the human reasons for why. Heinz Thaufelder, whatever else he might have been to her, must have given her some of the insights for which she was hungry. I write that and I think that maybe that is what she was, more than anything. Hungry. All her life, in one way or another, hungry. What do I know? Nothing, really. Nothing at all. But hunger seems like the kind of powerful force that would compel her to go to the source, and to devote twenty years to writing about the Dreyfus case, to understanding it on a personal, on a human level, hunger for the truth, and the courage not to turn away from the brutality to which we’re all heir, from the certainty that the demonstration of heinousness by one is proof enough that it’s possible for us all. I do wonder — this is the most vapid speculation — if MG saw the sometimes excoriating responses to the Other Losses, the work of a novelist turned historian, and if perhaps she read into them a cautionary tale, if it might have sapped, in some small part, her own confidence in her own judgment. No way of knowing. But I wonder.
Yikes, this all has the look of a jelly mould, or is that mold, I can never get it right, taken too early from the fridge. I think it’s as cohesive as ever it’ll get. Heinz is put to bed as far as I’m concerned. Practicalities intervene. I need to feed Frances, who seems to have taken up residence in her daddy’s laundry hamper. Then it’s back home to get showered and changed and hie me off to a concert, Bach and Vivaldi. Baroque violins. Viols. Harpsichords. Bliss.
I’ll add by way of envoi that the music on August 10 at the compline service for MG at St. James’ Anglican Church, 303 E. Cordova, is going to be gorgeous and varied. Weirdly, had a note this morning from a woman I’ve hardly seen since we were friends almost 40 years ago. She said that her son — I didn’t know she had a son — will be one of the singers handling the plainsong chants. A wink from the universe as it licks is paw. Thanks for reading, xo B
P.S.
Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, August 5