“I’m not interested in doctors,” said Lankes distrustfully.

“Dr. Hollatz advised my father always to eat the head of the codfish.”

“Then I’ll take the tail. I see you’re trying to sell me a bill of goods.” Lankes was still suspicious.

“So much the better for Oskar. The head is what I prefer.”

“Well, if you’re so crazy about it, I’ll take the head.”

“You’re having a tough time, aren’t you, Lankes,” I said. “All right, the head is yours, I’ll take the tail.” This, I hoped, would be the end of our dialogue.

“Heh, heh!” said Lankes. “I guess I put one over on you.”

Oskar admitted that Lankes had put one over on him. Well I knew that his portion wouldn’t taste right unless it were seasoned with the asurance that he had put one over on me. A shrewd article, a lucky bastard, I called him—then we fell to.

He took the head piece, I squeezed what was left of the lemon juice over the white, crumbling flesh of the tail piece, whence, as I picked it up, two or three butter-soft wedges of garlic detached themselves.

Sucking at his bones, Lankes peered over at me and the tail piece: “Give me a taste of your tail.” I nodded, he took his taste, and was undecided until Oskar took a taste of his head piece and assured him once again that he, Lankes, had as usual got the better deal.

We drank red Bordeaux with the fish. I felt sorry about that, I should have preferred to see white wine in our coffee cups. Lankes swept my regrets aside; when he was a corporal in Dora Seven, he remembered, they had never drunk anything but red wine. They had still been drinking red wine when the invasion started: “Boy, oh boy, were we liquored up! Kowalski, Scherbach, and little Leuthold didn’t even notice anything was wrong. And now they’re all in the same cemetery, the other side of Cabourg. Over by Arromanches, it was Tommies, here in our sector, Canadians, millions of them. Before we could get our suspenders up, there they were, saying, ‘How are you?’ “

A little later, waving his fork and spitting out bones: “Say, who do you think I ran into in Cabourg today? Herzog, Lieutenant Herzog, the nut, you met him on your tour of inspection. You remember him, don’t you?”

Of course Oskar remembered Lieutenant Herzog. Lankes went on to tell me over the fish that Herzog returned to Cabourg year in, year out, with maps and surveying instruments, because the thought of these fortifications gave him no sleep. He was planning to drop in at Dora Seven and do a bit of measuring.

We were still on the fish—little by little the contours of the backbone were emerging—when Lieutenant Herzog turned up. Khaki knee breeches, plump calves, tennis shoes; a growth of grey-brown hair emerged from the open neck of his linen shirt. Naturally we kept our seats. Lankes introduced me as Oskar, his peacetime friend and wartime buddy, and addressed Herzog as Reserve Lieutenant Herzog.

The reserve lieutenant began at once to inspect Dora Seven. He began with the outside, and Lankes raised no objection. Herzog filled out charts and examined the land and sea through his binoculars. Then for a moment he caressed the gun embrasures of Dora Six as tenderly as though fondling his wife. When he wished to inspect the inside of Dora Seven, our villa, our summer house, Lankes wouldn’t hear of it: “Herzog, man, what’s the matter with you? Poking around in concrete. Maybe it was news ten years ago. Now it’s passé.”

“Passé” is a pet word with Lankes. Everything under the sun is either news or passé. But the reserve lieutenant held that nothing was passé, that the accounts were still unclear, that some of the figures would have to be rectified, that men would always be called upon to give an account of themselves before the judgment seat of history, and that was why he wanted to inspect the inside of Dora Seven: “I hope, Lankes, that I have made myself clear.”

Herzog’s shadow fell across our table and fish. He meant to pass around us to the pillbox entrance, over which concrete ornaments still bore witness to the creative hand of Corporal Lankes.

But Herzog never got past our table. Rising swiftly, Lankes’ fist, still gripping its fork but making no use of it, sent Reserve Lieutenant Herzog sprawling backward on the sand. Shaking his head, deploring the interruption of our meal, Lankes stood up, seized a fistful of the lieutenant’s shirt, dragged him to the edge of the dune—the track in the sand was remarkably straight, I recall—and tossed him off. He had vanished from my sight but not, unfortunately, from my hearing. He gathered together his surveying instruments, which Lankes had thrown after him, and went away grumbling and conjuring up all the historical ghosts that Lankes had dismissed as passé.

“ He’s not so very wrong,” said Lankes, “ even if he is a nut. If we hadn’t been so soused when the shooting started, who knows what would have happened to those Canadians.”

I could only nod assent, for just the day before, at low tide, I had found the telltale button of a Canadian uniform in among the empty crab shells. As pleased as though he had found a rare Etruscan coin, Oscar had secreted the button in his wallet.

Brief as it was, Lieutenant Herzog’s visit had conjured up memories: “Do you remember, Lankes, when our theatrical group was inspecting your concrete and we had breakfast on top of the pillbox? There was a little breeze just like today. And suddenly there were six or seven nuns, looking for crabs in the Rommel asparagus, and you, Lankes, you had orders to clear the beach; which you did with a murderous machine gun.”

Sucking bones, Lankes remembered; he even remembered their names: Sister Scholastica, Sister Agneta… he described the novice as a rosy little face with lots of black around it. His portrait of her was so vivid that it partly, but only partly, concealed the image, which never left me, of my trained nurse, my secular Sister Dorothea. A few minutes later—I wasn’t surprised enough to put it down as a miracle—a young nun came drifting across the dunes from the direction of Cabourg. Pink little face, with lots of black around it, there was no mistaking her.

She was shielding herself from the sun with a black umbrella such as elderly gentlemen carry. Over her eyes arched a poison-green celluloid shade, suggesting dynamic movie directors in Hollywood. Off in the dunes someone was calling her. There seemed to be more nuns about. “Sister Agneta!” the voice cried, “Sister Agneta, where are you?”

And Sister Agneta, the young thing who could be seen over the backbone of our codfish: “Here I am, Sister Scholastica. There’s no wind here.”

Lankes grinned and nodded his wolf’s head complacently, as though he himself had conjured up this Catholic parade, as though nothing in the world could startle him.

The young nun caught sight of us and stopped still, to one side of the pillbox. “Oh!” gasped her rosy face between slightly protruding but otherwise flawless teeth.

Lankes turned head and neck without stirring his body: “Hiya, Sister, taking a little walk?”

How quickly the answer came: “We always go to the seashore once a year. But for me it’s the first time. I never saw the ocean before. It’s so big.”

There was no denying that. To this day I look upon her description of the ocean as the only accurate one. Lankes played the host, poked about in my portion of fish and offered her some: “Won’t you try a little fish, Sister? It’s still warm.”

I was amazed at the ease with which he spoke French, and Oskar also tried his hand at the foreign language: “Nothing to worry about. It’s Friday anyway.”

But even this tactful allusion to the rules of her order could not move the young girl, so cleverly dissimulated in the nun’s clothes, to partake of our repast.

“Do you always live here?” her curiosity impelled her to ask. Our pillbox struck her as pretty and a wee bit comical. But then, unfortunately, the mother superior and five other nuns, all with black umbrellas and green visors, entered the picture over the crest of the dune. Agneta whished away. As far as I could understand the flurry of words clipped by the east wind, she was given a good lecture and made to take her place in the group.