Free Nightingale by Aleksandr Voinov

door behind them, took a deep breath, and continued into the living room, where he switched on the light.
    The boche stood there, smiling somewhat tentatively, but the red swastika armband leached all humor and goodwill from the room. Yves gave him wide berth as he walked to the bedroom and hurried to pull the brown package out by its piece of twine and then return to the living room.
    “Your hat.” He held it out to the soldier.
    The soldier took it, hands quickly tracing the shape inside the paper, and another smile bloomed on his face. He was so much less guarded than Heinrich. Compared to von Starck’s solidity, this man was physically more imposing, but didn’t exude that old-world nobility. This man? An overgrown farm boy, recruited for his Aryan looks. It was near impossible to hate him while he smiled like that.
    Yves folded his arms in front of his chest, waited for the no doubt awkward “thank you and goodbye” slaughter of his language. But it wasn’t forthcoming. And wasn’t that familiar? Once the Germans occupied a space, they weren’t giving it up. He’d been a fool.
    “Is there anything else you want?”
    “Slower.”
    Yves repeated his question, gesticulated, even, part of his comical stage persona seeping into his behavior. Clown for the Germans. Dance, monkey.
    The German smiled again at him, tapped the hat with his fingers, then nodded. That will be all .
    “I am Falk Harfner.” The man touched his chest like he was reenacting Tarzan the Ape Man . Shame that he was just as attractive and imposing as Weissmuller.
    Yves bit down on a sarcastic “And I’m Jane” comment. What was he supposed to do? Certainly not make fun of the harsh “alk-arf” sounds there. “ Monsieur ‘arfner.” My pleasure. No, really. Shiniest pair of jackboots I’ve seen in my life, monsieur .
    He took heart and began herding the German out the door, noticing the man’s reluctance, as if there were more words that needed to be said. But every passing moment just reinforced how dangerous the situation was. He’d been caught out once with the Germans—he certainly wasn’t going to turn this into a habit.

Chapter 10
     
    Sitting through the four hours of Lohengrin was only bearable because of the powerful, yet smooth German tenor singing the title role. For one, Yves barely understood a word that was spoken. The performance went with the original German libretto rather than the French or Italian translations.
    In an ironic but certainly deliberate twist, Elsa of Brabant was sung by a Frenchwoman, who rather believably swooned in the arms of her German grail knight. The medieval tale took on new barbs as a German production in Paris under the auspice of Dr. Abetz and the censors. Wagner, of course, was beyond reproach, and Yves struggled to ignore how the story of an outside messiah bringing deliverance to a beleaguered duke’s daughter had become something sinister. Hard to forget that the opera was set in Antwerp, which, like Paris, was occupied by the Germans.
    The German notables who seemed to make up at least half of the audience clearly saw those parallels. There was a smugness and self-satisfaction in their faces that not even the enjoyment of the music’s beauty could wipe away. And seeing the Hitler salute executed in these hallowed halls turned Yves’s stomach to cold iron. Never mind how good German opera was, he’d never get beyond their arrogance over it.
    “How are you liking it?” Heinrich asked him in the first intermission, offering him a glass of champagne.
    Yves accepted it with a nod, but before he could answer, he saw that another officer was trying to attract Heinrich’s attention. For the amount of high-ranking officers present, it seemed expedient to believe that the tickets for this had never even left the German Embassy and the Army Headquarters.
    “ Heil Hitler !” boomed the other officer, and Heinrich clicked his heels, though he did not mirror the German greeting. Yves slunk