The Third Reich

SEPTEMBER 4

I bought sandwiches at a bar called Lolita and beers at a supermarket. When El Quemado arrived I told him to sit beside the bed and I took a seat to the right of the table, with one hand resting in a relaxed fashion on the edge of the game board. I had a wideangle view: to one side El Quemado, with the bed and the bedside table (the Florian Linden book still on it!) behind him, and to the other side, to the left, the open balcony, the white chairs, the Paseo Marítimo, the beach, the pedal boat fortress. I planned to let him speak first, but words didn’t come easily to El Quemado, so I talked. I began by giving him a brief account of Ingeborg’s departure: the train trip, her job, full stop. I don’t know whether he was convinced. I went on to talk about the nature of the game, saying who knows how many stupid things, among them that the urge to play is simply a kind of song and that the players are singers performing an infinite range of compositions, dream compositions, deep-bore compositions, wish compositions, against the backdrop of a constantly shifting geography; decomposing food, that was what the maps and their constituent parts— the rules, the throws of the dice, the final victory or defeat—were like. Rotting food. I think that was when I brought out the sandwiches and beers, and as El Quemado began to eat I sprang over his legs and grabbed the Florian Linden book as if it were a treasure about to vanish into thin air. Among its pages I found no letter, no note, not the tiniest sign of hope. Just random words, police interrogations and confessions. Outside, night gradually crept over the beach and created the illusion of movement, of small dunes and fissures in the sand. Without moving from where he was, in a corner that grew darker and darker, El Quemado ate with the slowness of a ruminant, his lowered gaze fixed on the floor or on the tips of his huge fingers, emitting at regular intervals moans that were almost inaudible. I must confess that I experienced something like revulsion, a feeling of suffocation and heat. El Quemado’s moans each time he swallowed a mouthful of bread and cheese, or bread and ham, depending on which of the two sandwiches he was eating, constricted my chest until it felt as if it would burst. Overcome by weakness, I stepped over to the switch and turned on the light. Immediately I felt better, although there was still a hum in my temples, a hum that didn’t prevent me from picking up where I’d left off. Instead of sitting down again, I paced back and forth from the table to the bathroom door (I turned the bathroom light on too) and talked about the distribution of the army corps, about the dilemmas that two or more fronts could pose for the German player possessed of a limited number of forces, about the difficulties involved in transferring vast masses of infantry and armored units from west to east, from the north of Europe to the north of Africa, and about the common fate of average players: a fatal insufficiency of units to cover everything. These reflections caused El Quemado, with his mouth full, to pose a question that I didn’t bother to answer; I didn’t even understand it. I suppose I was carried away by my own momentum and inside I didn’t feel very well. So instead of responding I told him to come over to the map and take a look for himself. Meekly El Quemado approached and agreed that I was right: anyone could see that the black counters wouldn’t win. But wait! With my strategy, the situation changed. As an example, I described a match played in Stuttgart not long ago, although in my heart I gradually realized that this wasn’t what I wanted to say. What did I want to say? I don’t know. But it was important. Then: complete silence. El Quemado sat down next to the bed again, holding a little piece of sandwich between two fingers like an engagement ring, and I went out on the balcony walking as if in slow motion and I looked up at the stars and down at the tourists passing below. If only I hadn’t. Sitting on the edge of the Paseo Marítimo, the Wolf and the Lamb were watching my room. When they saw me they waved and shouted. Although at first I thought they were shouting insults, their cries were friendly. They wanted us to come down and have a drink with them (how they knew that El Quemado was there is a mystery to me) and beckoned more and more urgently; it wasn’t long before I saw passersby raising their eyes to search for the balcony that was the source of all the commotion. I had two options: either to retreat and close the balcony door without a word or to get rid of them with a promise that I had no intention of keeping. Both possibilities were unpleasant; red faced (a detail that the Wolf and the Lamb couldn’t see, considering the distance), I promised that I’d meet them in a while at the Andalusia Lodge. I stood on the balcony until they were lost from sight. In the room El Quemado was studying the counters deployed on the Eastern front. Engrossed, he seemed to understand how and why the units were deployed along particular lines, though obviously that was impossible. I dropped into a chair and said I was tired. El Quemado scarcely blinked. Then I asked why that pair of morons couldn’t leave me alone. What do they want? To play? asked El Quemado. I noticed an attempt at clumsy irony on his lips. No, I answered, they want to go out drinking, have fun, anything that makes them feel less mummified.

“A monotonous life, isn’t it?” he croaked.

“Even worse, a monotonous holiday.”

“Well, they’re not on holiday.”

“It doesn’t make any difference, they live offof other people’s holidays, they attach themselves to other people’s holidays and leisure and make tourists’ lives miserable. They’re parasites.”

El Quemado stared at me incredulously. Evidently the Wolf and the Lamb were his friends despite the apparent divide between them. In any case, I didn’t regret what I’d said. I remembered—or rather saw—Ingeborg’s face, fresh and rosy, and the certainty of happiness I felt when I was with her. All wrecked. The force of the injustice quickened my movements: I picked up tweezers and with the speed of a cashier counting out bills I placed the counters in the force pools, the units in the proper squares, and, trying not to sound dramatic, I invited him to play one or two turns, though my intention was to play a full game, through the Great Destruction. El Quemado hunched his shoulders and smiled several times, still undecided. This made him look almost uglier than I could bear, so as he considered his response I stared at a random point on the map, as is done in matches when the opponents are two players who have never met before, each avoiding the physical presence of the other until the first turn begins. When I looked up I met El Quemado’s innocent eyes, and I could see that he accepted. We pulled our chairs over to the table and deployed our forces. The armies of Poland, France, and the USSR were left with an unpropitious opening gambit, though it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, considering that El Quemado was such a beginner. The English Army, meanwhile, occupied decent positions, its fleet evenly distributed—with support in the Mediterranean from the French fleet—and the few army corps covering hexes of strategic importance. El Quemado turned out to be a fast learner. The global situation on the map to some degree resembled the historic situation, which doesn’t often happen when it’s veterans playing each other. They would never deploy the Polish Army along the border, or the French Army on all the hexes of the Maginot Line, since it makes most sense for the Poles to defend Warsaw in a ring, and for the French to cover just one hex of the Maginot Line. I took the first turn, explaining as I went, so that El Quemado was able to understand and appreciate the elegance with which my armored units broke through the Polish defenses (air superiority and mechanized exploitation), the massing of forces on the border with France, Belgium, and Holland, Italy’s declaration of war, and the advance (toward Tunis!) of the bulk of the troops stationed in Libya (the conventional wisdom is that Italy should enter the war no sooner than the winter of ’39, or if possible the spring of ’40, a strategy to which I obviously don’t subscribe), the entry of two German armored corps into Genoa, the trampoline hex (Essen) where I based my paratrooper corps, etc., all this with a minimal expenditure of BRP. El Quemado’s response could only be tentative: on the Eastern front he invaded the Baltic states and the adjoining section of Poland, but he forgot to occupy Bessarabia; on the Western front he opted for the Attrition Option and disembarked the British Expeditionary Force (two infantry corps) in France; in the Mediterranean he sent reinforcements to Tunis and Bizerte. I still had the initiative. In the Winter ’39 turn I launched an all-out attack in the West; I conquered Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark; through the south of France I reached Marseilles, and through the north I reached Sedan and Hex N24. I restructured my Army Group East. I disembarked an armored corps in Tripoli during the SR. The Option in the Mediterranean was Attrition and I got no results, but the threat is now tangible: Tunis and Bizerte are under siege and the First Italian Expeditionary Corps has penetrated Algeria, which was completely undefended. On the border with Egypt, the forces are balanced. The problem for the Allies lies in knowing exactly where to throw their weight. El Quemado’s response can’t be as vigorous as the situation requires; on the Western front and in the Mediterranean he chooses the Attrition Option and he throws everything he can into the attack, but he’s playing with short stacks and, to make things worse, the dice don’t go his way. In the East he occupies Bessarabia and stakes out a line from the Romanian border to East Prussia. The next turn will be decisive, but by now it’s late and we have to put it off. We leave the hotel. At the Andalusia Lodge we run into the Wolf and the Lamb with three Dutch girls. The girls seem thrilled to meet me and they’re amazed that I’m German. At first I thought they were pulling my leg; in fact, they were surprised that a German would have anything to do with such eccentric characters. At three in the morning I returned to the Del Mar feeling content for the first time in days. Could it be that I was convinced at last that it hadn’t been pointless to stay? Maybe. At some point during the night, from the depths of his defeat (were we discussing my Offensive in the West?), El Quemado asked how long I planned to stay in Spain. I sensed fear in his voice.

“Until Charly’s body turns up,” I said.