Stained Glass (11 page)

She did not say anything, though her smile was expressive, amused, coquettish, and Blackford's thought meandered during the silence on how pleasurable it would be to take her to bed. They would walk hand in hand across the street to the inn, and in ten minutes he would scratch lightly at her door, she would open it, and he would sidle in through the opening. How
unthinking
all those writers who take it for granted in their novels that men can slide into the bedchambers of their trysts past reluctant doors opened only just wide enough to accommodate the width of their lateral frame at rest: Erika would open the door wide enough for him to walk in frontally. He would speak to her only in a child's German as he softly removed her nightgown and, moving her into the moonlight, press against her, and then tease her, using the German words just slightly, pertly, provocatively wrong, provoking her didactic instincts, and then intentionally misunderstanding her instructions, as he laid her down and—he bit his lip, feeling sweat on his brow, and dryness in his mouth. He caught her eye, she returned his glance fully and, with her eyes, said No. In seven languages.

CHAPTER 9

The Frankfurt convention, as the occasion was ever after referred to, dispelled any lingering complacency in Moscow, in Washington, and in Bonn. The meeting was held on October 15 in the old homesite of the Frankfurt National Assembly, the imposing Paulskirche. Reporters, television and movie cameramen trained their attention on the assembly, endeavoring to discern any special characteristics. There were none. There were burghers and farmers and merchants. There were at least five hundred student-aged men and women. Here and there those who knew the academic elite spotted a distinguished professor. Moreover, the assembly was composed not merely of the curious. This was a formal political convention fashioned after the American model, brought together for the purpose of nominating the leader of the Reunification Party. Everyone there, except the press and a few hundred friends and family, was a delegate or an alternate delegate—almost three thousand in all. They were accredited members of the movement, committed to its cause, and they came from every part of Germany.

There was music from a considerable orchestra—conveniently situated in the choir—as expected; but no hilarity. Germans had gone a long time since experiencing a political convention, and most did not even know what traditional behavior at a German political convention was. But the mood was set by the clear historical mandate of the meeting: to validate the claim to leadership of a young man who had risked his life to free Germany from domestic tyrants, and was prepared to risk it again to free Germany from foreign tyrants. To this awesome end this party was convened, formally consecrating itself; and from that exhilarating purpose it drew its strength. During the day the delegates heard a number of speeches from regional representatives of the party. The platform committee cautiously refrained from specifying the means by which the goal the party sought would be achieved: that exegetical responsibility would be for the party leader, in his own time, to discharge. So the platform was merely a paraphrasing of the speeches of Axel Wintergrin.

At six there was a break for dinner. The balloting was at eight. With no competing candidate, the balloting and the formal designation were a formality. At three minutes after nine the chairman of the convention rang down the gavel and announced that the leader and candidate of the Reunification Party was—Axel Wintergrin. The crowd rose, cheering from the heart, as the slim young man, dressed in his familiar tweed suit, walked out to the podium. The cheering would not stop, even though Wintergrin raised his right hand imploring the audience to be still as, with his left, he buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket. The restoring of order would take another fifteen minutes and, of course, comparisons were extruded in much of the press with the hypnotic ovations given to Adolf Hitler. But there were men and women there who had been at Hitler's rallies and they knew the difference: Hitler was preaching the necessity of asserting the national will for the purpose of aggrandizing The State and hating The Enemy. Wintergrin also preached the necessity of mobilizing the national will—but in order to undo a legacy of Hitler: the loss of one half the nation. Wintergrin's objectives were unassailable: No one, save a few German Communists who counted it more important that East Germans should live under Communism than that they should live as free men in a single German republic, could doubt the desirability of the goal. The quarrel, and the indecision, were over the question of means.

Axel Wintergrin could no longer put off specific statements of his intentions if elected, so he arrived quickly at the eagerly anticipated “platform of policies.”

—The Soviet Union would be given an ultimatum: To conduct free elections in East Germany under United Nations supervision by February 1.

—If the people of East Germany opted for reunification, that must be effected by April 1. (At the press table there was commotion. No one had suspected a timetable so wildly audacious.) Wintergrin did not bother even to allude to the hypothetical possibility that the East Germans would vote against reunification. To have done so, he implied, would have been to dishonor rational processes.

—If the Russians declined to hold the elections, the Government of West Germany would declare war against—and here Wintergrin said it carefully, twice, exactly—
not against the Soviet Union, but against any Soviet agent, irrespective of his nationality, who continued illegally to reside in East Germany
.

—To achieve the strength to carry out that war against foreign invaders, the West German Government would rearm. Such provisions in peace treaties, finalized or prospective, as forbade such rearmament would be considered null and void inasmuch as they were imposed on a people at the expense of that people's freedom, in violation of the United Nations covenant on human rights and of the axiomatic rights of nations, to rule themselves. No German weapons, said Count Wintergrin, would be aimed at anyone outside the boundaries of Germany.

—But this pledge, Count Wintergrin said, was contingent on no foreign troops being sent into Germany. If such troops were sent in, Germany would retaliate against the aggressor as necessary.

—Finally he came to the means. “I am in touch,” said Count Wintergrin, “with German scientists who are agreed that rather than risk the annihilation of the German people, whether resident in East or in West Germany, they will make available to our own army the definitive weapon of defense.”

He could not deliver his carefully prepared peroration. The crowd would not permit him to go on. The press was stampeding out to their typewriters, telephones, cable offices. The cameramen pulled out reels of film to be whisked off to the developers, and with fresh reels photographed the hysteria of the crowd. It was the hysteria of a people who only a few years earlier had been summoned to sacrifice everything for a cause that proved ignoble—and now were being asked to be prepared to sacrifice everything for a cause indisputably fine. It was the full cry of gratitude for a formula to erase, insofar as it was possible to do so, the awful consequences of the things done in the name of the German people. It was the road to self-esteem.

When the meeting in the White House adjourned it was after eleven. It had begun at two in the afternoon. At various stages it was a session on military strategy, a seminar on ethics, a debate on psychology, a hypothetical discussion of pre-emptive war, a history of assassinations, reflections on the Constitutional Convention, and a dispute on the rule of civil behavior at such meetings as this. The President sent word he would not attend the meeting and, moreover, that he would leave it to the Secretary of State to decide whether the President should be informed of the meeting's outcome. At one point, three hours after the sandwiches were eaten, and after the twelfth pitcher of coffee had been brought in, the Secretary of Defense, pointing his hand upstairs in the general direction of the Oval Office, made a heated reference to “old Pontius Pilate up there.” Presiding, the Secretary of State said that as the son of a Christian clergyman, he could not make out a case for Pontius Pilate, but as a former partner of Sullivan and Cromwell, he'd have advised Pilate to do exactly what he did. Over and over the variables were considered. Three times conversation stopped entirely until a specific piece of information was elicited—from Defense, from the CIA research division, from a nineteenth-century diplomatic protocol. At eight p.m., the chair ruled that no further
legal
discussion would be permitted. By nine, anybody who mentioned the Constitution of the United States one more time would have run the risk of being dragged out from the Situation Room, turned over to the marine guard, and shot. By eleven it had become clear to the exhausted assembly of five persons that whatever course of action the Secretary of State recommended was the course of action that would be taken. There was no other way to interpret his mandate from the President. And so it was left: He would make a decision. He would then report back to the executive committee of the National Security Council on the probable effects of that decision. Then the agencies of the government would deploy. The dapper Secretary motioned to the Director as, with some physical effort after so many sedentary hours, he pried himself up from the chair. “Let's go to my place, Allen.”

They did, settling gratefully for a scotch and soda, sitting deep in the Georgetown chintz, the windows tightly shut, the secret service guard discreetly at his station near the kitchen; the house otherwise empty, except for the cook and the maid, asleep on the third floor.

The Director spoke first. “Some of the points made tonight stick in my mind. Maybe it's true. Maybe Stalin
wants
Wintergrin to win the election and hand him that ultimatum.”

“Stalin certainly would want that if he had heard the nine hour conversation in that room tonight. That festival of indecision. Dear Allen, reassure me on at least that much. Was anyone in that room a Soviet agent? You're not by any chance a Soviet agent, are you, Allen?” The Director managed a weak smile.

“You wouldn't think, would you, that
we
were the world power with three hundred and sixty nuclear warheads, and the Soviet Union the power with nine paleolithic atomic bombs? That we have the air force to deliver those bombs, whereas they don't? That, after all, Wintergrin is asserting rights guaranteed under the UN Charter to which the Soviets are signatories? No, you would think that
we
were the aggressor, the threat to world peace, the weak sister, and Wintergrin the imperialist. It is inexplicable how these inversions come about.”

“It isn't really so inexplicable, Dean. We have a conscience. Isn't it
that
easy? And that difficult? We are required to think in terms from which Stalin is totally liberated. Even if we reject—or ‘transcend'—the norms, we are aware of them. And we are fatigued by the experience. We are … ambiguists.”

“Stalin himself has plenty to weigh. Well, not
plenty
, exactly. He has to weigh
our
reaction. He has never really cared about world opinion, and here Wintergrin has played into his hands. Have you noticed the cables? Wonderful! The line is exactly what any Soviet-watcher would have supposed: WINTERGRIN THREATENS ATOMIC WAR AGAINST SOVIET PEOPLE: WORLD HOLOCAUST POSSIBLE. That line, played over and over again during the next two months, would provide the Communists with cover for the resurrection of extermination camps for the purpose of providing a final solution to anyone in Germany who by his vote in the November elections signified a desire to live in freedom.”

“You're right, you're right. The only thing that's going to stop them is if we tell 'em, and if we tell 'em in a way that leaves them in no doubt that if they march into Germany, we'll dump on Moscow: right down in the Kremlin courtyard—”

“And send John Hersey over a month later in a gas mask to lucubrate on it all—” the Secretary interrupted.

“But who's going to tell them that?”

The Secretary sipped at his drink. “Let me see now. The Voice of America. Or shall we send a delegation to Moscow? Ah, yes. A bipartisan commission headed by Adlai Stevenson–he could take a couple of weeks off from the campaign: nobody would notice. And as delegates, let's see: Norman Cousins? Of course. Archibald MacLeish? He
terrified
Hitler. What's the name of that tiger in Greenwich Village? The woman. Yes. Mary McCarthy. ‘We are here, Comrade Stalin, to have one last look at the Kremlin because, you see, the day after tomorrow it will cease to exist. That is the message from our government. Bipartisan message. That's why Adlai Stevenson is the head of the delegation.' Allen, am I going nuts?”

“From all appearances, I would say yes, Dean.”

“That will prove a terrible loss to mankind.”

“You forget, there won't be any mankind left.”

“I forgot.”

“It does seem late in the evening to worry about mankind.”

They went back to their scotches and said nothing for a few minutes. The Secretary looked at his watch. It was after midnight.

“Let's meet here for breakfast at six a.m., Allen.”

“I'll be here,” the Director said, rising. He took his overcoat from the rack, but didn't put it on. “I'll manage, thanks.” He opened the door, and slid into the waiting limousine.

The next morning when he returned, he found the Secretary in the kitchen, making the toast. Without looking up, he began right away. “We shall have to go along with them, Allen. As you turn it over in your mind, there is, really, no alternative.”

“I've reached the same conclusion.”

“But here is where I think we can make a point with old hatchet face.” They were seated now at the kitchen table, the juice was already served, and the Secretary poured the coffee as he sat down. “Why shouldn't
they
do it?”