Martin sometimes wondered if Rudi remembered him after all these years. The boy would be what, nine years old by now? Ten? Four years was nothing to him, Martin thought, but in the life of a child? It was substantial. He knew if Annaliese were to meet him now, she’d say that she’d been right telling him he could no longer see her son. Sometimes, he’d catch his double reflection in the cracked mirror and laugh at the irony of it all, and he’d think: yes; yes, she was right. And she was, he knew.
He didn’t want Rudi to see him the way he was now.
Not like this.
Life in Paris had been hard when he first arrived, because Post-War Paris was Black Marketeers, gangsters, and pimps pushing cocaine, heroin, and sex. It saddened him to think there were times when he took comfort among them, snorting cocaine and heroin, later selling handjobs for three francs, and blowjobs for ten. They’d meet in dirty, squalid alleys. Once, he’d been beaten up and raped. It reminded him of the Camp and how sometimes the Guards beat him, or else watched as the Kapos raped him after he returned from performing for some Nazi big-wigs, or dignitaries.
All he had to comfort himself with in those days was a piano he found in a small, run-down café in the Montmartre district of Paris. He’d sit for hours playing Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt, while tourists—rich, loud, entitled Americans mostly—put money in his shirt pocket, slapped him on the back, and asked him to play Little Richard, or Jerry Lee Lewis. Martin would nod, smile, and continue playing his Beethoven. After a while, they gave him the money and didn’t bother him with their requests.
He found an apartment that was close to the café. The café’s owner was only too happy to provide him with free food, and drinks, watching in amazement as patrons came pouring in, sometimes lining up at the door and into the street. He’d play for four hours non-stop: concertos, sonatas, etudes—playing snippets and samples—and the music would echo through the small café and into the street where people paused to listen.
The café’s owner put tables and chairs outside, as well as new table cloths and candles. He hired more staff, replaced the stained carpets, painted the dirty walls, opened doors and windows, and put single flowers in skinny vases on each table. Everyday at 10:00 am Martin would sit in front of the piano, and wait. He’d close his eyes and nod his head in time to a beat only he could hear, and when he brought his hands up to the keyboard, it was magical.
People marvelled at his genius.
*
Martin couldn’t see the back of the club most nights, not from where he was seated behind the piano. “That’s because you’re Upper Stage Right,” Bijou called out, both he and La Niña laughing.
They always danced in front of him, blocking his view when they did their nightly sex show for the foreign tourists. Martin didn’t mind that the stage was small; he’d made it obvious to Bijou that he wasn’t a prude when he reached down and cupped the man’s balls one night. What did it matter to him if Bijou and La Niña were lovers? They were young, and it was Paris. Besides, he told himself, every one needs at least one true love in their life.
He’d had his.
Bijou now owned the club. He was in the dressing room waiting for La Niña who’d wandered off somewhere on his own. He called the club Le Bijou dan la Bayou, because he said it sounded foreign and exotic. He’d started working there when it was still the tiny café Martin visited everyday to play the piano. Bijou had made a fortune in tips the foreigners were willing to pay him if he’d let them have a table inside. When Bijou was twenty-nine, he bought the café and turned it into a drag bar.
It sold out every night from the first day it opened.
“No more free lunches for you, Martin,” Bijou said with a laugh. “You’ll have to sing for your supper from now on…just like the rest of us.” He was dressed in his customary red velour suit, a length of white, peroxided hair hanging in a long ponytail past his shoulders. He always wore make-up, with big fake eyelashes and perfectly arched eyebrows behind wide-framed glasses that seemed to magnify his hazel eyes. His cheeks were always lightly rouged, and his lips a brilliant red that matched his suit. He was leaning against the dressing table, vainly looking at his reflection in the cracked mirror.
“Twenty-five years ago you would’ve never seen me in a place like this,” Martin said in a sombre tone, reaching for a cigarette. The club was closed—it was 5:00 am—and he was scraping at the smeared, caked on make-up. Bijou laughed, and then saw the tattoo on Martin’s arm.
“Twenty-five years ago, it would’ve been 1931,” Bijou said, his smile fading. “You were probably some frightened little German queer hiding in the Hitler Youth, hoping they wouldn’t find you out.”
“Twenty-five years ago?” Martin smiled. “Twenty-five years ago I was nineteen and on stage in London playing Beethoven for the King and Queen of England,” Martin said, and Bijou stared at him, shocked.
“London?”
“I was never part of the Hitler Youth. I was the pride of the National Socialist Party though, thanks to my old maestro, Herr Beck. I was what you’d call a child prodigy—a poster child for the Aryan Race, if I was anything. I played for Hitler, and Goering, and all the rest of them. In 1931 I was nineteen, and handsome, my hair dyed blonde to go with my blue eyes so that I looked like the perfect Aryan. I’d been on stage since I was ten.”
“Is that what you play here every night? Beethoven?”
“No. That’s Chopin.”
“You don’t have to wear the wig if you don’t want to,” Bijou said after a moment.
“Why not?” Martin asked. He hated wearing the wig, but at least, seated where he was, he knew no one in the crowd would recognize him even if they did see him.
“I thought you were in the Camps?” Bijou said. It wasn’t so much a statement as it was a question, and it caught Martin off-guard, bringing back the memories he’d been trying to forget, but knew he never would.
“When I wasn’t on stage,” he said with a slow nod. “Yes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went into Sachsenhausen in August of 1942, a little after Germany declared war on America. It took them a year before they realized who I was. In the meantime, I was in the camp orchestra. They had us playing when the new internees arrived. It was meant to calm them. As if Wagner would soothe a troubled soul. They locked most of us homos in there together, along with the gypsies, the mentally feeble, and whatever other degenerate people they hadn’t already killed. If you were a homo, you either went to Sachsenhausen, or you went to Dachau. They kept the Jews separated. It didn’t really matter though, did it? They sent us all to the Death Camps after they started their so-called—what did they call it—their Final Solution?”
“Why are you telling me this?” Bijou asked.
“Why?” Martin said, staring up at the man’s reflection, forcing himself to smile. “I don’t know. At first, I thought you should know—”
“That you suffered?”
“Is that what you think? That I suffered?” he asked.
“What am I supposed to think?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone this before,” Martin said, looking up at Bijou briefly before stubbing his cigarette out. There was a glint of tears in his eyes, and he turned away, not wanting Bijou to see.
“I wasn’t part of the war,” Bijou said at last, reaching for a cigarette. He waited as Martin held the lighter up. “Mama sent us away before the Germans invaded.”
“Sent you where?”
“To Canada. There was just me and my sister. Mamma did whatever she could to keep us out of it. She had a sister in Quebec. I found out later my father was rounded up and sent off to a work camp. Work camp? Slave labour is what it was. He never made it out; neither did my mother.”
Martin nodded.
“It was a bad time for all of us,” Martin said, and turning toward the mirror started wiping his make-up off.
“There was a man asking about you tonight,” Bijou said, changing the subject.
“What sort of a man? Young?Attractive?” Martin asked the mirrored reflection.
“As if!” Bijou scoffed. “No. He was old and decrepit—much like yourself. I’ve seen him about; he begs near the Louvre. He lives somewhere down by the river, or so I’ve heard. You could tell he’s been through the wringer once or twice. But he asked for you by name.”
“Why is that so strange?”
“Because most people call you Marilyn.”
La Niña came back in with three friends, and the small dressing room was soon over-crowded. Bijou looked at La Niña and appeared almost relieved to see him, Martin noted. He watched them in the cracked mirror, both of their reflections unbalanced and messed up, and he wondered what sort of a man could be interested in him.
THE TRUTH OF WHO WE ARE