April in Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

scarcely muffled by the thin wall, someone was talking on the telephone. “Well, if you bring the sisters, I won’t call Dorine.” A brief laugh. “You’ve really taken on quite a lot! Let’s say nine-thirty, then?” The phone was hung up, and then I heard the dial rotating. I stared at the illuminated rectangle in the building across the street. My watch showed exactly eight o’clock. “Est-ce que je pourrais parler avec Mademoiselle Dorine? Elle n’est pas là? Quoi?” The window grew dark.

5

    Who taught you how to remove a carburetor?”
    “Qui t’a appris comment on démonte un carburateur?”
    “Je sais le faire,” the boy replied.
    “I just know how to.”
    “Who showed you how?”
    “Qui t’a montré?”
    “Je ne sais plus.”
    “I can’t remember.”
    “Friends?”
    “Maybe.”
    “School friends, or grown-ups?”
    “I can’t remember.”
    The captain sat on the edge of the desk and swung his boot back and forth. “You should make an effort,” he said softly.
    32 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R
    They had practically drowned the boy in the tub. They’d also dislocated three more of his fingers. The doctor was a second lieutenant, a thickset man with a goatee and manicured hands. He didn’t give the boy any sort of anesthetic before pressing his finger joints back into place. Without a cry, without a whimper, and without warning, the boy threw up. The doctor complained about the puke on his waistcoat. Afterward, the captain provided the delinquent with some details of the new tortures that awaited him. Only then did the boy confess to having stolen the carburetors. This information had no actual relevance. The registry office had long since requisitioned other buses for prisoner transport.
    What they really wanted to know was where the Resistance fighters were hiding. The two corporals took up their positions in front of the boy again. I turned my head away.
    “Smoke break?” The captain was staring at me. Had he noticed that I’d closed my eyes? He gave me permission to leave the room. At first, I thought it was so I wouldn’t be a witness. But then I saw from the look on his face that he was sparing my feel-ings. As we went out, I heard the first scream.
    The captain was an Austrian named Leibold. In the interrogation room and behind the desk, he appeared icy and harsh, but outside the office, he liked to talk about home. His fine-featured face looked lost under his bald crown. Almost daily, we stood for a while together at the end of the hall, where the windows gave onto an unlikely garden instead of the street. Roses were budding there, and wild vines crept up the walls like green down.
    “I miss the mountains,” Leibold said, offering me a cigarette.
    “Do you know the area around Sankt Wolfgang, in the Salzkam-A P R I L I N PA R I S . 33
    mergut?” He talked about the animals he liked, about the flowers and fruit he’d picked. About upland meadows and lake villages, about the solitude and the sheer rock faces where you needed ropes and crampons. I blew smoke against the windowpane.
    While he spoke, I watched a one-armed man mow the grass with a scythe attached to the leather harness he wore.
    Leibold fell silent, waiting for a reply. “I’m a city person,” I confessed.
    “Then you must like Paris.”
    I flicked ash off my cigarette. “Sometimes our presence here seems unreal.”
    I noticed his watchful look and quickly corrected myself. “Unreal, but justified.” My eyes roamed around the garden. “How long do you suppose it took him to learn to use that scythe with one arm?”
    Leibold stepped behind me. “War is the mother of invention,”
    he said. Expensive cologne, a hint of moth powder. “How do you spend your evenings, Roth?”
    “In my hotel, mostly.” I didn’t move.
    “You never have any fun?”
    I heard the crackling as he dragged on his cigarette.
    “I read a lot.”
    “That’s not what I mean.”
    “These … places, these bars, are too loud for