The Trespassers
Authors: Laura Z. Hobson
Laura Z. Hobson
To Raymond Gosselin
CHAPTER ONE
T
HE MIGRATIONS HAD BEGUN
. At that point in time, the trains, the ships, the rutted dirt roads, the cement highways, the vaulting air lanes of the earth and seas and skies were beginning to carry again the ones in flight.
From the early thirties onward, the flow of the migrations swelled and thickened. In nineteen thirty-seven and -eight and -nine, two million of Europe’s people were moving, flying before the bitter fact that they were not wanted, not safe on the ground they knew and loved.
Movement, flight, the roots uptorn, the dear belongings left behind, the unknowing roses abandoned in the garden—gone forever the beloved view from the kitchen window, the comfortable smile of a twenty-year-known neighbor.
Movement, flight, the aching decision, the visit to the Consulate, the seeking for affidavits and visas and passports, the last locking of the door, the train pulling away forever from the friendly station, the border crossed, the sea sailed—already the surface of the earth was restless and harassed with the ones in flight.
These new ones were to be the aliens wherever they went. The decent and kindly imagination grappled with it, tried to comprehend and share the emotions of flight, of the frightened and harried seeking that constricted the hearts of these many. Two million faces turned toward the strange land, planning it will be better there, we will be safe again in France, in England, in Belgium, in America, we will have courage and begin all over, the children are young enough so they will not understand nor be too deeply wounded, and as for us, the older…
From Germany the human flight poured forth, from Austria and Czechoslovakia. From Poland and Spain, from Yugoslavia and Rumania, from Italy and Hungary. And behind the ones that already moved were untold millions more, who thus far knew flight only as a scheming in the heart, an urgency in the blood, to escape while there was still time.
But for two million, the fleeing had already started. They were en route; they were committed, for them there was no turning back. For them the only hope lay beyond the frontier, lay in tomorrow.
And each night through that time began the tossing and terrible dreaming. Two million dreams each night, the nightmares of flight, the wishful dreams of welcome and safety, the recurrent dreams of being stopped by cold-eyed authority—your papers? your permits? your passports are out of date, you will have to go back …
douane, contrôle,
Ellis Island, alien registry…
And not only human beings were in motion across the face of the earth. Manuscripts of novelists were being shipped for safety to foreign lands, away from the quiet desk in the familiar well-lit library to a distant vault, a safe-deposit box, a publisher’s files in another land.
Mathematical formulae were traveling, anthropological data, religious tracts, sermons about a man’s faith in a power beyond the national dictator’s. And chemical research and economic treatises and all the beautiful, devious, certain or uncertain products of men’s minds migrated over state boundaries, national borders, through seaports—all seeking haven.
And a thousand canvases were flying before the new political critique, carrying their brave pigments, their bold or delicate lines and shadows, to freedom. And a thousand songs and poems and essays were migrating—expatriates, all, while there was still time.
All this was quite unlike the simultaneous flight of thirty other millions from the wars that were blasting China and Spain. That other flight was a purely physical fleeing on one’s own soil from the steel tyranny of bomb and bullet and shell. But in a curious way, such physical need for flight was less of an assault on the dignity of the men who fled; the flesh was outraged and wounded, but not the subtle spirit, the proud heart. The tyranny of bomb and bullet was of kinder steel than that other tyranny of scorn and persecution.
In nineteen thirty-seven and -eight and -nine, the migrations of the unwanted were on. The earth had known other vast migrations, in ancient times and modern, had known the eager journeys of those who of themselves sought a richer soil, a fuller chance; had known migrations from war and famine and revolution. But this newest flight of life and potentiality was the first of all flights to a closed or closing earth.
This was a journey toward uncertainty, the most uncertain migration since that earliest one of the creatures migrating from the ancient seas on to the new and slimy land.
Only, on that new and slimy land in the dawn of man’s evolution, the new arrivals found no hostile faces, no closed legislative doors, no fearful reckoning whether there was room, whether there were jobs, whether there was, even, the willing heart to bid them enter.
Dr. Franz Vederle waited on the street before his house for the postman coming toward him. He took the packet of letters and riffled through them quickly. There was no letter with an American postmark.
He felt a small slap of disappointment, and smiled at his own childishness. Only if her reply had caught the
Bremen
could it be here already. And she could scarcely mail the documents within twenty-four hours of receiving his cable.
Patience. She had wired those three immediate words,
OF COURSE, WRITING,
but these arrangements took time.
Surely by now the letter was on its way. Ann Willis would not leave him wondering or waiting a day longer than necessary. That day, two years ago, when she was saying good-by, she had cried out, “If I ever, ever can do anything for you, for God’s sake, let me”—on that day he had not thought the need would come. But it had come, the desperate need, and a week ago he had cabled.
He was a tall man, slim and dark, looking his thirty-nine years now because his face was grave and thoughtful, not because of the physical markings of time. There was quick, excitable depth in his brown eyes, laid over by quiet weariness. The planes of his face were definite from hairline to chin; it was a strong face, candid and pleasing. He looked more French or Spanish than Viennese, because of the darkness in hair, eyes, mustache, because of the quick gestures of hands, the darting life of his glance.
Yet he had been born in Vienna, had lived all his boyhood and until his marriage in the business section of the city, his family not too poor, nor too insecure on his father’s small professorship to make for him a happy, busy boyhood, an assured education in medicine. There had been always enough money for vacations in England and France, and enough, too, for his lessons at the piano.
After his marriage, he and Christa had lived in a small, charming flat just off the Universitätstrasse, where it enters the Ringstrasse, and though Vienna’s life was sad and poor, their own was rich in music, work, and love.
When Paul was born and they needed more room, they had moved out here to Döbling, on the outskirts. Years before, as a child, Franz used to be taken by his parents to walk through Döbling. Always he had thought of it as an unattainable fairyland. The houses, set back in deep, flowery space, seemed to him then to have a tangible overlay of culture and wealth. Later, when his feeling for music had developed into a leaping, irrational love, the older streets of Döbling drew him like a shrine to be worshiped. For Beethoven, with his dark discontent and seeking, had lived in almost every other house, and Schubert too had lived and written there. Wandering through those old streets, he had pondered always on the ceaseless quest of those two, the quest, only, for beauty, for the free and soaring melody. When he was a man, he too would try to care only for the things that were free and noble.
And eleven years ago, after Paul’s birth, they had moved from Vienna to Döbling. “We’ll live here until we die.” He had said that to Christa. She had smiled, nodded happily, her small face had worn a fleeting proprietary pride, for it was her own money, left to her by her aristocratic Aunt Ilse, which had bought the house for them.
Now he walked slowly up the flagged path back to the house. He looked about him from some new plateau of emotion. Already the shooting green of new grass pierced through the foggy gray of the slate-slabbed path. Everywhere over the bushes and lawn shone the tentative twinkle of new green, and the first thin yellow of plumping, splitting buds. For eleven springtimes, he and Christa had watched this gentle, silent renewal overtake each bush, each tree, each stretch of winter-brown lawn.
His throat knobbed up. Somehow it went more against the grain to pull up roots in the early spring when the whole instinct of the earth was toward growth and renascence. One wished to flower with it; it was curiously deathlike to interrupt the process.
“Still,” he reminded himself, “one transplants in the early spring, too.”
Paul’s, face, so self-reliant and bright, appeared briefly in an upstairs window, and a moment later, the small, lively feminine face of little Ilse. They stood there behind the pane, smiling and calling inaudible words down to him. This transplanting would not be easy for children of eleven and five; the separation from the mother at birth was scarcely harsher than the first separation from the good, secure ground one had always lived upon.
Christa heard him open the door. She came rapidly toward him, and knew the letter had not come from the casual way he held the packet of envelopes. They were bills, invitations, notices of a meeting of the Society, of something at the University, personal mail—the world’s daily offering to him in his busy and illustrious life. But not the letter.
“The next boat,” he said. “Surely. Try not to be anxious.”
“I am not anxious a bit,” she said.
“Christl is tired,” he thought, “and she looks older. I suppose most Viennese are a little tired and older since the
Anchluss.
”
“I am not at all anxious, in the usual way,” Christa said. “Only today—”
She turned her head slightly from him, but not quickly enough to prevent his seeing the concern in her blue eyes. She was short, slight; her features were small, with a soft bluntness of line to the short nose and small chin that he always found curiously endearing. She was four years younger than he, but there was something inexperienced and sheltered about her that made her always seem younger. The first time, years ago, he had called her by the affectionate “Christl,” he had thought of the English meaning of the two syllables and found it oddly appropriate. “Crystal.” She was somehow like the word, delicate and fragile. These past weeks, she had seemed so troubled, so inadequate for the grinding decision.
“Only today, Paul came in from school and—he was joking of course—”
“Yes, and he—?”
There was commotion above them. They both looked up; the children were racing along the hall and then down the stairs. Their beloved black spaniel, Hansi, raced after them. Midway down, Paul stopped, seeing his father’s eye upon him. Then he tensed his small body into a soldier’s straight, line, clicked his heels, and shot his right arm up.
“
Heil Hitler
,” he shouted. “
Sieg Heil.
”
“There—that’s—that’s what he did today,” Christa whispered.
“Ah-h-h—”
It was a long, difficult breath that came out of him. Only part of it was anger. A long time ago, or so it seemed now, he had heard his breath wrung out of him so, long, painful. Then too only part of it had been anger. He had been reading a speech made by the German Minister of Justice to the Association of University Professors.