Prussian Blue

TWENTY-FIVE

I changed trains in Chaumont and boarded another headed north for Nancy, which is over a hundred kilometers from the German border, although the realization had now dawned that I wasn’t sure where exactly the border was, not anymore. I knew where the old French-German border was but not the new one, not since the war. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, France had treated the Saar as a French Protectorate and an important resource for economic exploitation. Then, in the referendum of October 1955, the dominantly German Sarrois had voted by an overwhelming majority to reject the idea of an independent Saarland—which would still have suited the French—a result that was generally interpreted as the region’s rejection of France and an indication of its strong support for joining the Federal Republic of Germany. But I had no idea if the French recognized this result, which would mean they had finally ceded control of the Saar to the FRG. Knowing the French, and the historic significance our two countries had attached to this much-disputed territory, it seemed unlikely they would let it go so easily. Given the bitterness of the ongoing French-Algerian war, and France’s obvious reluctance to leave North Africa to rule itself, I could hardly imagine the Franzis were just going to walk out of a region of even greater industrial importance such as the Saar. The fact was, even if I got as far as Saarbrücken, I had no idea if being there would really make me any safer from arrest. There would still be plenty of French policemen around to make my life as a fugitive hazardous. I had to hope that as a French-speaking German native, I might at least be a little more anonymous. Anonymous enough to get me to the true Federal Republic. But even Nancy began to seem like a long way off when, just as the train was pulling out of the picturesque town of Neufchâteau, about halfway to my chosen destination, some uniformed French police got on and started checking identity cards.

I walked slowly to the opposite end of the train, where I lit a Camel and considered my options. I thought I had just a few minutes before they would reach me, whereupon I would be arrested and probably taken back to a jail cell in Dijon. And there I would soon find myself at the mercy of some Stasi poisoner. Of course, the police might have been looking for someone else, but my detective’s nose told me this was unlikely. There’s nothing police like more than a nationwide manhunt. It gets everyone excited and gives the local cops an excuse to neglect their paperwork in order to try to put one over on the big-city boys. My only hope now seemed to be that the Nancy train would stop or slow down long enough for me to jump off. But even a glance out the window told me that while this was good country for growing grapes, it was a poor place to hide; there was very little cover and, along the bank of the river Meuse, everything looked as flat and featureless as the French economy. Things would have been easier in Germany where there is a more established tradition of hiking and wandering the countryside. But the French are not given to walking anywhere except to the local bakery and the tabac. With some dogs on my tail, the police would certainly catch me in a matter of hours. A few minutes of reflection persuaded me that my best chance—if I had the nerve for it—was to hide from the police in plain sight. It wasn’t much of a plan but there are times when a poor plan looks like a better choice than a good one—when a crooked log makes a straight fire. We’ve got a word for that, but it’s a very long one and most people run out of breath before they finish it. I was running out of breath myself.

So I waited until the train was about to enter a small copse of plane trees, reached up above my head, braced myself, and then pulled the emergency brake. As the train shuddered to a screeching halt I threw open a door in the carriage with a loud bang and then hid inside the nearest lavatory. I waited there for several minutes, like a real Sitzpinkler, until I heard some shouts down on the track outside that were enough to tell me that the police truly believed that a passenger had taken fright at their presence and jumped off the train. Then I left the lavatory and walked slowly back to those carriages where I had seen the police already conducting an identity check. None of the other passengers paid much attention to me; they were all too busy looking out of the windows at the police, who were running alongside the train or looking underneath it for a wanted felon. From time to time I stopped and looked outside myself and asked people what was happening. Someone told me that the police were looking for an Algerian terrorist from the FLN; someone else assured me that they were looking for a man who’d murdered his wife, and grinned when I pulled a face and asked if this still counted as a crime in France. Nobody mentioned the Blue Train murderer, which gave me hope that I might yet pass through this part of France undetected.

At the very end of the train I sat down and started to read the early edition of the France-Soir I’d bought in Chaumont. I hoped that in the time it would take the driver to reset the brake, and the police to conduct a search of the area surrounding the tracks, I might recover some of my nerve, but I found BLUE TRAIN MURDER occupying a whole column of page five, which did little for my confidence. Reading it, I could almost feel the noose tightening around my neck, especially since the memory of a noose around my neck was all too vivid. The suspect’s Citroën had been found in the town of Gevrey-Chambertin and he was believed to be on the run somewhere in Burgundy. My nerves were stretched to breaking, however, when two or three policemen got back on the train. It seemed the others were making their way back to Neufchâteau to collect a search party. To my relief, the policemen on the train had given up any thought of checking more identities. Instead, the train drove off at half speed with the cops looking out the windows, hoping to spot a man making a run for it across the open fields. After a while one of them even came and sat beside me and asked me for a match. I handed him a box and let him light his cigarette before I asked him what all the excitement was about. He told me they were hunting for the Blue Train murderer and that as soon they were back in Nancy, they were going to organize the local police to conduct an extensive search of the area around Chaumont.

“How do you know he’s in this area?” I asked coolly.

“We had a tip he was in Dijon after his car was found a short way south of there. And a man answering his description was seen near the station.

“He must have been on this train. It’s obvious he saw us get on and decided to make a run for it. But we’ll catch him soon enough. He’s German, you see. There’s no way a German can hide in France. Not since the war. Someone’s bound to give him away sooner or later. Nobody likes Germans.”

I nodded firmly, as if such a thing were quite irrefutable.

In Nancy I marched swiftly away from the main railway station, confident only that I would not be taking any more French trains for a while. For no reason I could think of except that I was dog tired and emotionally exhausted—I could certainly have used a tube of Pervitin now—I found my heart poking through the ribs of my chest: for the first time in a long time I thought of my late mother, which necessitated a brief halt in a telephone kiosk where I applied some more collyrium to my eyes. After that I walked a short distance east, through quiet streets to an impressively baroque church called Saint Sebastian, and there I was at last able to relax. I even managed to doze off for a while. Nobody looks at a man who’s in a church with his eyes closed; not the faithful at prayer, nor the nuns cleaning the place, nor the priests taking confession; even God leaves you alone in a church. Perhaps God most of all.

I stayed in the church of Saint Sebastian for a full hour before I felt confident enough to venture outside again, by which time it was late afternoon. I’d thought about taking a bus but that seemed as potentially hazardous as a train, and I was merely putting off the moment when I would surely have to find a more private means of transport. Another car required too much paperwork and I was thinking about a small motorcycle or a scooter; but on Rue des 4 Églises I saw a shop full of secondhand bicycles. A bicycle was surely the least suspicious mode of transport available; after all, children, schoolteachers, and priests, even policemen, ride bicycles. A bicycle implied that you were not in a hurry, and there is nothing that arouses suspicion less than someone who is not in a hurry. So I purchased an old green Lapierre with good tires, some lights, and a luggage rack, onto which I tied my bag. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ridden a bike—probably when I was a beat copper—and, in spite of the old saying that you never forget how, I almost did and nearly spilled myself into the path of a delivery van, which provided me with a very useful private lesson in the nicer points of the French language. I steadied myself beside the machine, mounted it a second time, and was just about to start pedaling away from Nancy for good when I saw the central covered market next door to the bicycle shop and had an idea how to render myself even more inconspicuous. I went inside and within just a few minutes I had also bought several strings of onions. The stall owner gave me a suspicious sort of look as if to say, What could you want with so many? and even in France, onion soup didn’t seem to be much of an answer, so I offered no explanation, just my money, which, for the French, is usually all the explanation required, especially near the end of a long working day. And, with the strings hanging on my handlebars, I was soon cycling east, across the Meurthe River toward the open countryside of Moselle, like a real Onion Johnny. At the very least, if a cop did stop me I thought the onions might be used as a means of explaining my red eyes.

I cycled through the evening and into the night, but not very used to the effort of it, I managed only about fifteen kilometers an hour. Being a schoolboy with a bicycle never felt so strenuous; then again, Berlin is very flat and a perfect place to cycle anywhere, as long as it’s near Berlin. Before the war you could go for kilometer after kilometer without encountering so much as a bump in the road.

At nine o’clock it was too dark to travel any farther and, in a crummy little village called Château-Salins, I finally had to admit my exhaustion and stop to give my eyes and my backside a rest. I regarded the pink Hotel de Ville next to the town hall on Rue de Nancy with longing, imagining the excellent dinner and the soft bed I might have enjoyed there, but I would have been required to show them an identity card or a passport and I was keen to avoid leaving any kind of a paper trail that the French police—and by extension the Stasi—could pick up. I wheeled the heavy Lapierre through the streets until, on the tattered edge of town, I saw a field covered with hay bales in the moonlight, and I learned that they had a soft bed free for the night that did not require me to show any identification at all. And there, in hay still warm from the heat of the day and with only a few insects for company, I ate the bread and cheese I’d bought in Chaumont—I even ate a raw onion, too—drank a bottle of beer, smoked my last Camel, and slept as well as any man ever slept who had no job, no home, no friends, no wife, nor any notion of a future. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.