4/19/10

The Three of Us Cannot Go On
By Kyle Hemmings


There. It’s over. She stands over their closed caskets, side to side. Elsie, with her black veil and blue eyes from the bottom of the North Sea, is too numb to make sense out of any of it. After all, it was love or some misshapen arrangement of it, wasn’t it? She, the sole survivor and the real loser, wishes to lie between them. Her British lover from MI6, Michael, and her husband, Otto, the notorious ex-Nazi, who British Intelligence had labeled as “Chameleon.” It is a day of low scuttling clouds that steal her breath.

In her black dress, she does not quiver. She works up a slow perfunctory smile, the lips pressed tight. Such control. She now thinks of escaping to a cold climate, where the whiteness of her lies will be replaced by the whiteness of snow. She wants Norway. There, she will invent a new identity and a new history. But for now, where she stands, still as a sculpture of glass, with her auburn hair that once took in the sun, she is nowhere near the North Sea.

It is Costa del Sol, a place redolent with apple carts and winding mountain roads, the rich and the jet set, in love with reflections, in love with the thought of love. Soon, for Elsie, Costa del Sol will be the distant cry of a southern bird.

As a young girl growing up in West Berlin, Elsie had seen many movies. But the one behind her eyes is the best, spliced and leaping in absurd juxtapositions.

In some scenes, her husband is the director and she is the femme fatale actress, girlish and charming and so utterly flighty, luring loved-starved men, mostly British agents, young and poorly instructed, into an endless cobweb. Michael, an MI6 assassin, who was brilliant at setting up targets, is the victim. But in the end, everyone falls down.

As the men lower the caskets into the ground, Elsie thinks: The three of them. Weren’t they so magnificent with their tortuous schemes and their jaunty rides up the Axargrua? Or the way she’d seduce Michael in a dusty room of some white-washed castle, peeling off her clothes with the unceremonious innocence of a madwoman making tea for no one. Didn’t their love rise high above the grape yards and the orange groves? Oh, Michael.

The film runs and loops. A different time. A young girl, homeless on the streets of Berlin. Women tear at each other for pieces of bread. Elsie has lost her family in an air raid. Sensing the stranger following her, she turns. Frightened, but offering friendship, she says, “Sehen Sie meine Puppe, Herr?” See my doll, mister? She’s as hungry as me.

He is towering. She is powerless. His face softens, the lips offer an ironic smile. His eyes talk. They say,” I will feed you. I will be your new father.”

She follows him home. She never leaves.

Years pass. They are constantly on the run and he invents new names. He makes her his princess, sends her to private schools. She is tall and beautiful. She can walk and sit poised like a model. He sees business possibilities. She can lure British and American agents. Then, he marries his own creation. He is now the most powerful man in the world--he makes love to his own creation.

She feeds agents the elusive bread of her body. They drown in a sea of her. When Otto tells them, they have killed a defecting Russian scientist, or a misidentified agent, they realize it’s a trap. Too late. He gives them an ultimatum: either work for me, or this information goes public. In Costa del Sol, Otto passes himself off as a wealthy Hungarian businessman. He pays off the police. He builds a whole network of ex-Nazis and young misinformed British and American agents. With some, they suddenly go missing. And Michael. He is tricked into killing a Russian defector at an opera house.

The film goes fuzzy, then, a close-up of Michael’s breathless face, his bare torso. He runs towards her on the beach, grabs her hands. Look, he says, lets run to Morocco. Tarfilalt. A place where there is nothing but sand.

He sees her limp smile, a look he has noted in so many photos of double agents.

My husband, she says.

The three of us cannot, he says.

The film fast forwards. She storms into Otto’s den. Her fingers shake. “If you touch one hair on his head,” and she stammers. “I swear I’ll leave you.”

Otto rises. Smiles. Smug. “You cannot leave me,” he says, “Blut ist Starker als Wasser.” Blood is thicker than water. His smile turns to water. “Have I really lost you?” he says. She trembles and begins to cry. She runs from the room.

In the backyard, she doubles over, feels nauseous. She takes slow steps towards the man-made brook. Her stomach feels like a fist.

In the top drawer of the desk, he keeps a luger. She looks down at the brook. The gun raises, cocked at his head. She looks down. Michael’s eyes at the bottom of the brook. Staring up at the sky that is an endless moor. She turns. Screams. The sound of the gun. A shot around the world. Hers. Otto slumps over. Leaves a pool of red lifeline no longer. She screams at the sky. An endless unnerving shriek.

On the plane, she holds a book of Norwegian phrases. She will settle in a small fishing village near the Hardengerfjord. When old woman ask her why a beautiful young girl like her is not married, she will say she is not ready. She will grow old in that fishing village. She will sleep alone at night. In middle age, she will write her memoirs. On the first page, it will read: “I had the luxury of loving so many men. But there are only two whose faces I still sleep with. . .”


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Kyle Hemmings lives and works and plays in New Jersey.