The Trespassers (10 page)

His voice broke a little.

Vederle went over to him, put his hand on his shoulder, and said nothing.

“You know there is great resistance in New York and in London,” Schneirmann asked in a moment, and quite matter-of-factly, “to refugee physicians? Among the doctors there, I mean?”

“Yes, I had heard something—”

“Oh, a regular boycott, is developing. I have had most discouraging letters. The English and American doctors are afraid the refugee will practice for a pittance fee to get started. They are even making stricter new laws about licensing refugee physicians.”

“Yes. I suppose it’s natural. Many people hate—unconsciously, probably—hate all refugees. In New York and London and Paris there have already been so many from Germany. It will be harder for late-comers, like us.”

“Like us? Then you are really—?”

Vederle nodded. “And you?”

Schneirmann shrugged gently. He seemed not to care enough, to be indifferent to the future. He looked old, beaten, though Franz knew he was not much past fifty. Still, fifty—the needed energy, the necessary will to act, to organize, to begin again, all these were often siphoned from a man’s spirit by the time he was fifty.

“Is it money?” he went on, hesitating. “I could—”

“Thanks, Franz. No, not especially. I am alone, it would not cost so much for me alone. I—well, it would be so hard to return later, for those who leave now. I think it might be wiser to wait it out. It will never be as bad here as in Germany.”

There it was, the folly, the fantasy, the inability to face the whole reality. In the past fortnight, Vederle had heard the same sentiment from a dozen people. How many thousands, how many millions among the seven million Austrians still believed that somehow it would be “better” in Austria than in Germany? What would make them see that Nazism was Nazism—that there could not be a “mild” Nazism since its very essence was violence, destruction? “I think you’re mistaken, Hermann. I think it will be exactly as bad,” he said, “and more quickly. It took them years there to develop the technique. Now it’s perfected, and they’ll clamp it down at once here.”

The other only shrugged once more.

“Listen. Christa will be at the Karl Hof in Basel. If you change your mind and wish help—whatever help other refugees can give—write her there. She will know where to find me, in case we are separated.”

He left then, pocketing the signed document Schneirmann had given him. When he reached home, he found the house in turmoil. Suitcases, trunks, packing cases of every size stood about, half packed. Books, manuscript, even sheet music and bound volumes of music were piled up, waiting. Skis stood in one corner of the hallway, the two long pair, a medium pair for Paul, and the small runners for Ilse. There were tennis rackets too, ice skates, and sitting in forlorn isolation on the settee in the living room were Ilse’s family of dolls, six of them, in all sizes, ranged primly side by side, waiting. The spaniel, Hansi, raced about in a bright frenzy of anticipation.

Franz almost laughed in his first despairing glimpse of the complete misunderstanding in this household of what flight actually meant.

Paul and Ilse came rushing toward him.

“My bicycle, Father, I’ll
need
it, and yet Mommy says—” Paul’s eyes were gleaming with excitement. So he looked each June during the preparations for going to their country place. Ilse was shoving herself in front of Paul, eager to get attention for
her
problems.

“And I
couldn’t
leave Gretchen or Nina or Trudy home for so long, Daddy,” she begged, as if they had already argued the matter for some time. “They would get so lonely. I—”

Christa came to him. She threw out both her hands to indicate the rooms strewn with their belongings, all the big and little parts of their life, memory, shared experiences. She looked confused, unhappy.

“And my camera—what about that, and the stamp album?” Paul was saying. “I just simply couldn’t think of leaving—”

“Please tell Mommy, the doll carriage, the big one, not that little old straw thing—” Ilse’s voice was tense with pleading.

“And what do you think, Father?” Paul went on, his voice heavy with young and amused irony. “Mommy even said we’d have to ask you about taking Hansi. We could
never
leave Hansi behind.”

How make children understand that all the hundred precious things, the beloved landmarks of normal and sheltered childhood, were to be abandoned? He and Christa had decided not to tell them too soon of what lay ahead; to guard them for as long as possible from the news that might be more difficult for them than adults knew. Now he had to try to explain and prepare them at least in part. They must not, later, feel that they had been fooled or betrayed.

“Here, here, what’s all this you’re asking me?” he said to both upturned, searching, faces. “Come and let’s talk this over a minute.”

He started for his small study, and the two children danced in behind him. They were in high, prancing spirits—a vacation in Switzerland was real adventure, more fun even than going to the Traunsee.

Dr. Vederle sat down and Ilse climbed to his knee. Paul threw himself on the rug and began emptying out an unbelievable assortment of things from his pockets.

“Listen to me, you monkeys,” Vederle began. “This is the time for us to have a very grown-up talk.”

The children unknowingly straightened up, suddenly watchful of his face and voice. Paul abandoned the small pile of possessions on the rug before him. Ilse twisted about to look into his face.

“I want to explain a little about your trip.” His tone fitted the easy, casual mood he wished to create for them. “You see, children, this isn’t going to be the same as all the other trips you’ve taken. This is more important.”

“How—why? Do you mean longer?” Paul asked.

Franz nodded.

“It’s to Switzerland, yes—but that’s only the first part.”

“Where, Daddy, oh, hurry, where are we going—to France? Italy?”

“Italy is where they give red wine to the babies,” Ilse put in surprisingly. Vederle laughed.

“No, not France or Italy. Much more interesting than that. How would you like to get on a great big ocean liner—”

“You mean—to America? Are—we—going—?” Paul’s voice was large and deep with awe. He had heard so much, read so much, about that strange country.

“Yes, that’s really where. Oh, not right away, of course. First you want to have some fun in Switzerland—”

Paul’s eyes were shining. But suddenly Ilse’s arms were tight around her father’s neck. She was pressing herself to him, her face hot against his cheek.

“Oh, no, Daddy,
please,
please, no. I don’t
want
to go there. I want to stay right here. Oh, please—”

She was not crying. Her chin and lips fought against the quivering that beset them, her arms pressed tighter. “I don’t
want
to go there—” And again he was at the station, hearing little Editha Wolff’s voice cry out against her unnamable fear. The first time a child meets fear, feels slipping out of its grasp all that is safe and known…

He remembered so well how it could be once when he was no more than five, no bigger than this frightened little Ilse, he had been roused from sleep by his mother in the middle of the night.

There was a fire blazing near the city’s gas supply, and the alarm had gone out—it was possible the great gas tanks might explode. He had been rushed into some clothes, half blind and staggering with the reluctant and stubborn sleepiness of a little boy; with his mother and father, he had gone running forth into the streets, to get as far as possible from the neighborhood.

They were the same streets he knew, that he played on and walked on. Yet he was never to forget the terrible quality of strangeness, because it was the middle of the night, because a lurid half-light glowed in the sky from the great fire beyond the houses, because—just because this was new, different, monstrous. He wanted only to reach out to his father, to his mother, to climb into somebody’s lap and hide his head and cry to them to stop all this Thing that was happening. But they were half walking, half running, and he had to go with them. Soon he heard his own sobbing voice in the air in front of him; he hadn’t meant to behave badly; he loathed himself for being a crybaby, but he simply could not check the awful feeling in his heart.

He remembered hearing his mother say, “Carry him, the poor child is tired,” and that then he was scooped up into his father’s arms and held against his shoulder, his own small knees hooked up against his father’s plump and comfortable stomach. He remembered, as if the memory were still somewhere in the muscles of his arms, how his small-boy’s arms had gone tight around his father’s neck, clinging, hanging to him as if to some God-given safety.

And here was little Ilse with her first fear. No menacing sky casting a fearful glare, no rushing through newly strange, nighttime streets—but a child’s terror was the same, whatever the cause. The very absence of tears told him that she was feeling no everyday kind of misery.

“Why don’t you cry, if you like?” he suggested quietly to her. “If you feel so badly, you can cry, you know, a little girl like you.”

She looked up at him, searching, and he smiled down at her. He had never talked that way about crying before, really he never seemed to notice one way or another before, as though it didn’t matter. He certainly never made fun of crying, the way other children’s fathers did. Something went all easy inside her, and she put her face back into his big shoulder and cried, and cried, but even that seemed all easy. Her arms went soft, the hard feeling left them, and she felt she had never loved this father so much and if he wanted them to go to another country, it was all right.

Paul had been patient, waiting. Now he began questioning again, and Franz explained as clearly as he thought he should. After a moment, Ilse’s weeping edged off into long, indrawn sobs and then quieted completely.

“It’s something that happens to very many people,” Vederle was saying, “that they decide for some reason to move from one house to another, or one city to another, and sometimes even from one country to another. Only when they move to another country, then they usually stay there much longer. That’s what we may do. We may come back here to Döbling before very long, or it may be that we shall stay in America instead, for a long time. We might like it there too much to want to leave, ever.”

“But my English is so very bad,” Paul said. “At school, the teacher—”

Christa came in as Paul was speaking.

“Your English is better than mine,” she said to him. “I envy you—and Father, who speaks it all the time to his American or British patients. But yours will be even better than his in a few months.”

“And I will learn, too?” Ilse asked. “Will I speak English, too?”

Vederle laughed.

“We’ll all speak English. Now let’s hurry with the packing. You may take along only the most precious toys—only the small ones. Bicycles and doll carriages are too big.”

He hesitated. Was it wiser to avoid the issue of Hansi? Or kinder to settle it at once?

“And we’ll put Hansi to board with Aunt Maria until we come back.”

“Oh, Father, no, oh, we
couldn’t—
”

That was Paul. Ilse said nothing; she ran to Hansi, flung herself down beside him, clutched him to her so passionately that he squealed and struggled.

“Yes, we must; I’m so awfully sorry. You know dogs are not allowed to travel in some countries, and even where they are allowed, they have to go in a small, tight box or cage with the trunks. Poor Hansi would be so uncomfortable and alone—”

Long after the children were in bed, exhausted by the strange excitements of the day, Christa and Franz were still channeling all their thoughts, their energies, to the task of their own packing. They talked almost not at all; over their hurried supper, he had told her about the visit to the Consulate, his tickets for the plane, her tickets for the night train tomorrow. She had merely nodded, not surprised except over details. It was better to leave Vienna separately of course, the departure would not look like permanent emigration. If all went well they would meet in Basel, in three days. The affidavits could be sent there instead. There was an American Consulate there and at Zurich; the visas could be issued at almost any branch of the American Foreign Service.

Beyond these timetable matters, these mundane arrangements of trains, addresses, schedules, they each withdrew into silence. Such upheaval was too grave to be verbalized easily. It was better to suppress one’s emotions as one tore down one’s past.

It was nearly three in the morning when they approached the end. Two large trunks and four suitcases stood ready for their locks. One large canvas duffel bag, spilling out sports equipment from its top, was to be taken also; at the very bottom of this innocent-visaged vehicle were Vederle’s printed manuscripts and his still unfinished work. His great medical library, which included not only the standard reference works every good doctor has, but also a unique, complete collection of every major paper, pamphlet, report, and book on his own field of psychoanalysis—that would have to stay behind.

Their other books, their Bechstein piano, their furniture, pictures, china, linens, all the beloved and slow accumulations of their thirteen years together as man and wife—these were all to be left untouched.

They would remain where they now were, on their shelves, in their cabinets, in their corners—a house to which the owners were soon returning. Only after the four Vederles were actually on the Atlantic was the second half of the removal to be attempted. Then, if all had gone smoothly, Christa’s aunt would hire workmen to crate, and express companies to ship, the contents of the house, and put the house itself up for rent or sale. But only then.

Spent emotionally and physically from the hours behind them, Franz and Christa finally sat wearily together in the living room. All that remained was to pack the single suitcase he would take on the airplane. They sat apart from each other, their minds still too occupied with the minutiae of decisions about what must be left, what taken, to be able to reach toward each other.