The Trespassers (11 page)

Suddenly Christa was sobbing. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she bent her face to her hands and was crying. She sat bolt upright, rigid except for the crying which shook her.

“I can’t, Franz, we mustn’t,” she began. “It is not your fault, I do not blame you for thinking I wished this too—I let you cable her without understanding what it would be—”

He stood up and came toward her. But he stopped a few feet away, listening to the words pouring forth between the concealing palms over her mouth. Between the spread fingers, he could see her eyes, tight closed in this violent rejection.

“For a long time, you knew that I did not want to think of leaving. Then—those first days after it really happened—
Anschluss
and the Webbers and the others—then I know you felt I was ready to go. Even my note today—I don’t blame you for feeling I agreed, because I did. But now—”

“Yes?” His voice was quiet, without disapproval.

“But now I know I can’t. You will have your work, new patients, and you are, anyway, different, stronger—men are always stronger. But I—I will never feel at home, never feel happy, always want to be back here—”

“No, Christl, it only seems hopeless now, because you are tired, because this packing up is hard—”

“I can’t, Franz. I feel I—I cannot learn to live over again—I—oh, I’m afraid—”

He sat beside her then, but did not make any other move.

“People are always a little afraid, Christl,” he said. “But your fears will go. We’ll be together, always, and the children. What could harm us? Many people are going through this same sadness and fear—all over the earth, everywhere. Think of all the Germans who’ve already gone to Holland, Belgium, Denmark, England—”

“That’s it, that’s just what I mean,” she broke in, passion and pleading in her voice. “Why can’t we simply go somewhere near—Holland or Belgium is as safe as America, and we would not be such foreigners there—the language—the habits—we could still see our friends, families—”

“As safe as America? Many Germans came to Austria, thinking it would always be safe here. I suppose that Holland or Belgium is safe—yet sometimes I think of the Wolffs in Holland, the Markheimers in France—”

“How wise they were. They’re at home—in Europe—Europeans are never happy anywhere else.”

He was looking off into a distance in history. “I try to imagine how it would be to settle again, build a new life, and then—have to fly once more—to have it to do all over again—”

“But really what I mean,” she cried out as if she were afraid to lose his attention to these new speculations of his, “I might as well say it. You will be angry, you will think I have no principles, but I must tell you—I have been feeling it more and more—”

“I will not be angry. Of course, say it. Say it wholly, and without keeping back any part.”

“—Say that I can’t—really—see any more why we should go at all. Do you hear, why we should go at all! It was an impulse—a fine, big impulse to protest, to stand on our principles. But, oh, Franz, maybe—”

“Yes—maybe?”

“I think perhaps the best thing is to stay here after all, and fight the Nazis here—not desert Austria now—”

Dismay lanced through his heart. This argument he had heard, too, as often almost as he had heard Schneirmann’s “it can’t be as bad in Austria.” Once he himself had dared to hope. But now? The hard, incorruptible fact that the Nazis would soon enough make any effective fight a mere dream, would kill or imprison the fighters, would plunder them of all power, of money, possessions, press, radio, meeting places—could this hard reality be overlooked any longer by anyone?

Yes, the fight would go on, of course, underground, latent, waiting for events which might let it come into the open. But those events? There would have to be, first, war—would it, after all, come to war? Or would the world outside the maniac orbit of Spain, Italy, the Reich see in time and act in time? Perhaps so—perhaps the Loyalists in Spain, perhaps the Chinese would soon have stanch allies, before it was too late. In the meantime, the underground fight—

“What are you thinking, Franz?”

It was too complex to explain. Better to remain on the level passages of practical affairs.

“How would we live here, Christa? My own practice is already falling to pieces. There will be no analysis even permitted in a few months—they will call it a degenerate Jewish myth.”

“Yes, but there will always be a need for doctors. You were a doctor before you began to specialize…”

“No.”

The first shaft of anger. She was tired, she was ridden by tensions and anxieties, true, but this suggestion was too monstrous. How could she brush aside his years of devoted work and study and practice in this still evolving branch of science?

To suggest he go back now to taking temperatures and writing prescriptions—it was a betrayal, an enmity.

Calmness came over him, then, all at once. Betrayal, nonsense, Enmity, nonsense. He, too, was too tired, too intense. She was not seriously suggesting anything of the sort. She was merely thrashing about in her weary, frightened mind, reaching violently for anything that came to hand which might serve as a weapon against the departure she still resisted more than he—or she—had suspected. Time, she needed time, to accept the necessity more completely. There was always a mourning period after any death. “To say good-by is to die a little.” It was an overemotional cliché, but there was truth in it.

Silent minutes slid by. When he began to talk, it was not in direct reply to what she had said, but of Germany and Austria, of the deep, neurotic self-revelations in
Mein Kampf,
in Hitler’s obsessive, revenge-ridden concept of “the master race.” He talked almost dispassionately, wanting her to gain insight for herself from the things she knew so well but still refused to fit in the painful pattern they made. Often they had had such talks, but never before had he felt there was so much at stake, for her own future and for the children’s, as well as for his.

It was almost four o‘clock when she spoke again.

“Oh, you are right, my darling,” she said, and such hopeless weariness lay upon the words that his heart tightened for her. “We must go. I shall try—not to let you down this way any more.”

For the last time, they slept in the house they loved in the country they loved.

As Franz and Christa slept, the last winds of March blew down over Germany to Vienna, blew over a confused and inert France down through the winter-whistling Pyrenees to Spain.

There, advancing just then through Catalonia and to the coast were General Franco’s troops; the towns and villages and cities in their path watched their fearful coming, knowing what it would mean.

Toward government-held territory, three million Spaniards fled for safety from the spread of the Fascist power, from the firing squads for Loyalist civilians, from the political inquisitions of the Fascist police. Three million fleeing within the borders of Spain itself, as now across half a world, sixteen million Chinese were fleeing within the borders of China itself.

And those who could not reach government-held territory in Spain turned toward the great wave of refugees beginning again to flow northward through the snowy mountain passes and on the uneasy seas into French cities and ports.

Months before, after the fall of Bilbao, the first such wave had come rolling over the borders, fleeing from Santander, from the Asturian ports, from all parts of northern Spain, by road, by rail, by sea. By October, 1937, France’s troubled Minister of the Interior announced that there were some 55,000 such Spaniards already within the land, and that their maintenance by local charities or by France itself in its government-erected camps was costing the country one million francs a day.

A million francs a day? It is too much. Let us have a formal decree and halt this expensive hospitality to the driven, the desperate. The decree ordered Spanish refugees to leave France by the sixteenth of October, and some 25,000 had been forced backward into Spain. They went, corrosive envy in their hearts for those fortunate ones who stayed behind.

The fortunate ones. Forget about them, they are the blessed, they have found harbor. Forget, for instance, the twelve hundred in the refugee camp at Maneuille just over the border. The camp once was a factory, but now, strewn about on the floors under the rusting machinery are straw mattresses where the tired may rest. The walls are soft with cobwebs, there is no fire or warmth, but there are rats and spiders to run over sleeping faces in the dark of the night. There are children here, among these fortunates, they are feverish with grippe, mottled with measles, racked with whooping cough. There is a committee organized in the small
département
of France where this camp is located, and a good simple Frenchman named Henri Grilloux is the elected chairman. He has tried for days upon days to visit the camp, but the authorities refuse permission. When he finally does go, he is horrified, he is a good simple Frenchman, he is gentle because he is gentle, he calls upon all the people of the
département
to come to a meeting, to find the ways to stop this fine torture. The meeting is held. From the whole region only fifty people come, fifty others who are good and gentle in their hearts. All fifty are workers; they have little money to donate.

The fortunate ones stayed behind. The less fortunate returned to Spain, spread reports of how it could be.

Yet now again, in another spring, in the last weeks of March and the first weeks of April, 1938, in the face of their knowledge that France did not want them, new thousands and tens of thousands were struggling north, searching out the chances of safety in France.

And that newest of man’s creatures, the refugee child, fled too.

While Franz and Christa slept fitfully in their restless, partly dismantled house, little Paul and Ilse slept for the last time in their sweet, familiar beds.

But in many thousands of strange beds in French, English, Danish, Russian houses or camps other children were sleeping, sleeping the lonely sleep of small children parted from their mothers and fathers and all the friendly safety of home.

Over 10,000 child refugees had said their wide-eyed farewells in Spain and gone forth alone to France; 6000 more had traveled thousands of strange miles to Soviet Russia; 3600 had sailed from Bilbao’s warm wharfs to the cool docks of Southampton and were now distributed to the new child-refugee camps or colonies, and some few to compassionate private houses throughout England.

Nearly 700 child refugees, mostly orphans, were sent across the ocean from Spain to Mexico, but the distance and the cost soon cut that life line. Private groups of citizens in Holland and Sweden and Czechoslovakia, unable to receive any Spanish children in their own countries, undertook absentee support of another 575 small wanderers in three French colonies. But Denmark established a colony for 102 Spanish children at Ordrup.

These were the children of Madrid, of Toledo and Alicante, of Barcelona. Some few went off to foreign lands eagerly, some others went unknowing or indifferent. But, for the most part, when the moment came to say good-by to mother or father or grandparents, the impersonal air of railway station or dock heard high-pitched young voices crying out, “But I don’t
want
to go away; it’s better at home than
anywhere.
”

The implacable winds of late March blew down over Germany into Austria, blew down over England and France into Spain. Paul and Ilse Vederle still slept their comforting sleep, and somewhere in Czechoslovakia, in the Sudeten regions, a young mother left her bed to go and stare down into the crib where her child stretched and smiled through his guileless dreaming.

Christa stood on the porch, waiting for the taxi. The big luggage had already gone; Franz had arranged all that before he had left for the airport in the early afternoon. Paul and Ilse were guardedly playing in the garden, watchful of their traveling clothes. Paul was sturdy and big in his topcoat, and Ilse prim and beautiful in her little girl’s sailor hat with streamers, her tailored English suit, so diminutive, so grown up.

It was late afternoon, but the sunshine of that first day of April was benign to Christa’s nerves. This had to be, there was no use fighting against it, no use in the lump in her throat. The next three hours would be hard; these family farewells were only ordeals for everyone. Still, a silent departure would have wounded Franz’ relatives and her own so deeply—

It all had to be. The lump in the throat would go away in time.

Ilse gave a shout of excitement, and Christa turned toward her. The child was kneeling in the grass, absorbed in something. Paul was talking to her quickly, giving directions, clamping his hands ‘tightly together, yet with the knuckles raised, as though he were making room for something inside.

“But tight, now, or it will run away—like this, oh, like
this,
or you’ll squash it, you silly.”

Now Ilse was getting to her feet, slowly, carefully, as though she were carrying some precious liquid in a brimming glass. She turned and Christa saw that her arms were held taut, straight out before her, and that her hands too were cupped tightly together.’

“Oh, Mommy, come, look, it is so beautiful.”

“No, don’t,” cried Paul. “Don’t open your hands, it’ll fly right off forever.”

“Maybe I could peek through a crack in your fingers,” Christa said.

“No, oh, not out here,” Ilse said. “In the house—then if she flies away I can catch her again.”

Just inside the door, Ilse stopped. Paul crowded in beside her, and Christa closed the door with elaborate care behind them all.

“Now, darling, hurry and show me,” she said. “The taxi will be here any moment. What
can
it be—a tiny bird?”

The small cupped hands parted in a series of minute little jerks. There, finally exposed on the pink palm of the lower hand lay a red-brown ladybug, its speckled beetle wings held tight together to make an unbroken curve of shell.

“It’s a ladybug, a lovely little ladybug,” Ilse whispered.

“She named her ‘Elizabetha,’ ” Paul said.

“She’s lovely, she really is, darling,” Christa said, “and it’s a nice name.”