ELLE AT LAST?

Paris

Odile, my booker, called after me, as I dragged myself up the stairs to my room, after another long day of useless go-sees.

“Come,” she said, “Jurgen is here, you should meet him.”

“Who’s Jurgen?”

“He’s a hot new photographer. He just arrived from Munich, and he’s looking for a new girl to test for ELLE. I think you might be perfect for him.”

I was tired after a long day in the hot streets and even hotter metro. But she had uttered the magic word – ELLE – and I wasn’t about to pass that up.

“Can I drop my stuff in my room and freshen up quickly?”

“Ok, but bring your portfolio back down,” she said, “vite, vite…”

My shitty portfolio, I thought, with those shitty pictures that every French photographer had ignored, just like Janice had predicted.

I was hungry but there was nothing to eat in our mini-fridge. Models were forever stealing each other’s food and Janice had left a huge note on the fridge door saying CHIEN MECHANT, KEEP OUT. I imagined a tiny French bulldog barking inside our dirty fridge. Janice always made me laugh, even when she scared me.

I took off my make-up, brushed my hair, applied a thin layer of foundation and ran back down. The German was in the conference room flicking through a portfolio.  He was by himself and spun around as if I’d scared him.

 “Gutentag,” I said.

“Hallo,” he said.

He was tall and skinny, with mad-scientist hair. He was kind of cute, but he was German and I’d been brainwashed to distrust all Germans. Our generation had been given a thorough education in the German atrocities the Germans of the Second World War, with annual exhibitions, slide shows and talks by survivors, all of which were helping us to never forget. Of course it also made us hate all things German. On top of this my mother had lived near the border when she was a teenager, and her village had been a German outpost throughout the occupation. The army had commandeered her father’s factories for the German war effort, and her mother was forced to raise pigs for the Germans, which she underfed in protest. Occasionally an English bomber would crash in a nearby field and once they hid a Scottish pilot under their staircase until someone from the underground came to move him to a safe house. My mother had always known how to speak German but after the war she only used it to chase Germans off Dutch property. My father had spent all four years in a concentration camp, but I only heard about this from my mother, because he’d died in a car accident when I was two years old. My stepfather too, had spent time in a camp. So no love was lost on Germans in my childhood home.

I stood across the room from Jurgen, who squinted as if he had vision problems.

“Have we met before?” He asked. “You remind me of someone.”

 “Not possible,” I answered, much too gruffly for the circumstances. (Hello, this is for ELLE not the Third Reich, I reminded myself.) 

 “Anyway, I don’t think so,” I added.

“Are you Dutch?” He asked. “My parents took us to the Dutch beaches every summer vacation.”

I bet they did. Since they had no significant sandy coast of their own, German tourists continued to invade our beaches every summer, which was when my mother’s command of the German language came in really handy.

German families would arrive at the beach early in the morning carrying their spades, towels and beach toys, and they’d dig these massive sandpits, like staking prime sun-bathing spots all over the empty beach, before going to breakfast or maybe even back to bed. This imperial behavior did not go down well, and my mother could be trusted to express our national outrage. Whenever she found these German craters, she’d throw out all the stuff, and, like a cuckoo, take over their sandy nest. When the German family found us, all settled in their spot, they became indignant and tried to re-claim it, but my mother would point out that the occupation was over and if they couldn’t be polite guests, they’d be deported.  

“We were at the beach too,” I said. “We have a place in Bergen.”

 “I know Bergen,” he said, “but we used to stay in Scheveningen.”

 “I guess we didn’t meet then.” I said, “but maybe all Dutch girls look alike?”

  He shook his head and smiled and I was pretty sure that he liked me.

 “I am doing a test for ELLE,” he said, “this weekend in the pool on the Seine, I have this vision for underwater pix, but the editor wants to see test shots first.”

When I didn’t respond he said, “are you a good swimmer and can you hold your breath and smile underwater?”

Holding my breath for a German, while smiling at him, wouldn’t come naturally, but it was for ELLE and Janice would be proud of me.

“Sure,” I said. “I just told you I spent my summers by the sea!”