The Trespassers (17 page)

They had moved there after only a fortnight in Basel. Visas were not issued in Basel, they found, but only in Zurich, a two-hour trip by train. Aside from that, Basel was oddly depressing. Hotel life restricted Paul and Ilse to much, the bustling city, with its baroque and Gothic houses, seemed to have no place for them. And, though it remained an unspoken thought, there was a curious need for being nearer to the American Consulate in Zurich. They felt like drawing close to it, as one does to a friend who offers understanding and help in a troubled time.

So far, the understanding and help had been leisurely and impersonal, but one knew of the constant pressure on all the consulates and could forgive some delay. The very first day after he and Christa had rejoined each other at Basel, they and the children had gone to Zurich. The Americans in the Consulate were polite and efficient, their papers and Mrs. Stamford’s affidavits and other documents were given quick preliminary examination, and their applications for reservations on quota numbers were entered in the books.

The whole thing had taken little more than an hour. Apart from their own excitement over the very act of applying in person for American visas, there was almost no incident to mark the visit. For a moment, it seemed there might be one.

“Budapest? You were born in Budapest?” the young man interviewing them asked Christa, in very passable German.

“Yes. My parents were Austrian citizens, but they were there just then. I have always lived in Austria.”

“Yes, I understand. The country of birth, though,” isn’t Austria, but Hungary. The Hungarian quota—”

Christa looked quickly at Franz.

“Among German friends, heard we—we heard often,” he offered helpfully in English, “that all the wifes go on the quota of the husband’s country.” The pleasant young man smiled and replied in English.

“Yes. There has to be a discretionary ruling on each case.”

Franz was not completely clear about what this meant, but the voice was reassuring. Apparently it was a routine matter, for the young man was going on through the rest of the documents. Over each paper or statement, he nodded his head in some affirmation.

When it was over, they felt in a holiday mood. They spent the rest of the day sight-seeing around the famous lake. Later, when they first thought of exchanging Basel for some more appealing surroundings, there was not a moment’s doubt where it should be.

The little house pleased them all, though it was old-fashioned and inconvenient in many ways. An old Swiss woman, Thilde, came in twice a week to do the heavy cleaning; for the rest Christa insisted that it would help the days along if she marketed and cooked and cleaned herself. Paul and Ilse thought this a capital way to live. They loved going to market every morning with their mother; it was a new and exciting pastime. There was a small tennis club and Paul took his first lessons. And the lake—that was best of all, with the sight-seeing steamers, the rowboats for hire, and the swimming. Paul was sure America could offer nothing as good as this. It was a million times better than their summer place at the Traunsee.

Franz liked the small house, too. It was a pleasant way in which to wait until their visas would be in their hands. Even though it seemed impractical for so short a time, he had rented a piano, and each day he practiced for two or three hours. It had been years since he had had free time for this, his restoring and gracious hobby, and one by one he worked back to his old proficiency on his best-loved Beethoven sonatas, Schubert impromptus, Brahms ballades, and Bach preludes and fugues.

The steady practicing was deeply good for him, and Christa often said that she enjoyed the sound of the great German music more than she had ever before enjoyed it or any other music. She said it tentatively, as though Franz would laugh. He felt it too, though, and did not laugh or wonder. All that had happened had been unable to prevent their carrying this beauty across the frontiers with them. There were things the Nazis and their decrees and Secret Police could never confiscate or proscribe. For as long as men in prison could whistle a few bars of the
verbotene
Mendelssohn, or say over in their minds the
verbotene
Heine’s
Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen,
they had the untouchable at their command, they could know themselves still defiant and unvanquished.

Now Franz rose eagerly to meet Christa as she came through the trellised door to the garden. Her question saddened him; she herself smiled rarely these days, and today particularly she felt slightly ill. It was as though she found him heartless to be able to find amusement in anything.

“I was smiling over a foolish notion I’ve been entertaining myself with,” he answered. “About affidavits—it’s no matter. How do you feel now, Christl? Better?”

“Oh, yes, it was nothing. A headache is so boring, though.”

“I don’t like it that you have one so often.”

“It’s silly, I know you must think they are only neurotic.”

“The pain is just as painful—”

“Oh, Franzi, isn’t it too bad an analyst cannot take his wife for a patient? I suppose it would do me good now. Couldn’t you
pretend
to have a proper objectivity with
me,
as if I were just someone you’d never seen before.”

“No, I couldn’t even pretend it if I wanted to.”

He smiled at her, and now she returned his smile. But he was concerned. Christa woke often in the night and lay tossing and tense. She ate unevenly; sometimes for days she was entirely uninterested in meals, only to change to an almost wolfish appetite. Often she spoke sharply to the children, and then her remorse afterward was too great, disproportionate to the offense. She was oversensitive to being spoken of as a “refugee.” Emigration was never easy; but with Christa he began to see it was more of a horror than it need be.

Sometimes he tried to speak about it, to help her accept it. Then she only felt a new guilt, that she was somehow betraying his entire profession by behaving in this strange manner. As though an analyst’s wife should, by some unheard-of osmosis, absorb the analytic process into her own being! He explained the folly of this guilt to her and she always nodded in complete acceptance and understanding. But she went right on feeling it.

“It will be easier for you when we have the visas and start for America,” he said. “Shall we take the children out on the lake?”

“Oh, yes, let’s. We’ll have a picnic supper on the shore or in the woods. It will be so nice.”

They took a cab to the near-by town of Küssnacht, and boarded one of the small lake steamers. They found seats up forward, and the children immediately plastered their slight bodies to the railing, to watch the prow-rolled water. Christa and Franz sat in close silence, their eyes turning always to the mountains in the clear high skies.

Soon Christa leaned her head back, closed her eyes. The little boat was rather crowded; voices and laughter came at one from all directions; it was soothing and friendly to lose one’s identity in a crowd of sight-seers and vacationers.

“…
ist überfremdet.”

“
Jawohl, die Überfremdung in der Schweiz ist so furchtbar, dass…
”

The voices drifted to her from a near-by group of talkers. They talked in the special Swiss-German dialect, but she had already become familiar with it. She glanced at Franz; he had not heard. She turned angry, wary eyes toward the loud-voiced speakers.

“
Überfremdet
.” An insulting word, a heartless and arrogant word. “Overaliened.” A newly coined word, to express a newly felt scorn. And the answer, the disgusted agreement. “Yes, indeed, the overaliening in Switzerland is already so dreadful that…”

She sat forward sharply, trying to see the enemies. A moment ago they had seemed merely pleasant fellow passengers on a friendly little ship. Now their very faces were threats to her pride, her sense of equality. Her sudden movement caught the eye of one of them, a flabby-bosomed woman in an embroidered blouse, a full plaid skirt, with red sandals over wide bare feet. Their eyes held for a moment. Then with the grotesque exaggeration of a third-rate actor “expressing scorn,” the flabby one raised her eyebrows and the shoulder nearest Christa. She turned away, said something un-catchable to her companions, and a laugh assaulted the sunny air.

Christa gripped the arms of the deck chair, started to rise, then helplessly sank back again. Sick anguish twisted inside her, and a hatred. How did these contemptuous strangers know that she and her family were foreigners; did she and Franz bear some mark on their foreheads that stamped them to all the world as aliens?

“
Aber in Wien…
” Ilse’s high vice drifted back to her. Of course, the children, prattling about Vienna, the Traunsee, Döbling in their Viennese accent.

Oh, that made it even worse; that these strangers should listen to children, to her and Franz’ children, and know only disgust and reluctance for their presence.

“Franz—” His eyes opened. Instantly concern filled them.

“You are ill, Christl? The motion of the boat?”

“No, oh, please don’t be so ridiculous,” she answered, irritated inexplicably. “I’m not a baby to get seasick from this.”

He made no reply. He saw her tight lips, saw the high color still rosying her throat, though above it her face was quite pale. His glance wandered about, in search of the cause for this sudden change in her.

“I—I’m sorry I spoke so,” Christa said quickly. “My foolish nerves play tricks. I am not seasick, Franz, I just heard those horrible people there…”

He listened, nodding in sympathy. A dozen times a week, in a dozen different places, came this small attack on their dignity. When they had joined each other in Basel, Christa had told him that in Italy her Austrian passport had stamped her everywhere as an inferior being; only foreigners with German passports were treated there with respect. He had not been surprised; that was Italy. Here in Switzerland, in democratic, international-minded Switzerland…But soon he found that even here, no day ended without its small deposit of contempt.

“Have you anything to identify yourself, sir?” The teller at the bank, so courteous, so affable. Then the Austrian passport slid over the marble counter, and the subtle change would come.

“Austrian? Yes, of course.” The voice a shade cooler, the eye a touch evasive. Vederle had been amused at first, then he had been angry, found himself constantly
en garde
in advance in any public place. He finally had achieved the armor of partial indifference. But it was, after all, only partial.

The same subtle attack came at one from the post-office clerks, the credit manager of the piano store, the registering officers at the police, even the librarian at the Municipal Library.

“It is maddening, my darling,” he said in a low voice to Christa, when she finished, her hot eyes burning into the oblivious back of the bloused and skirted woman. “You know, it is nothing new, this hatred of the foreigner. ‘Xenophobia,’ the ancient Greeks called it—‘fear of the stranger.’ That describes it more closely than ‘hatred.’ ”

“Fear? Why should they fear us? Why should they fear anyone who has had to leave his own country and come begging to a country that doesn’t want him? If any human being could be weaker, less to be feared—”

“It’s confused, most fear is. Some of it is that the alien might earn a few marks or francs or pounds that you feel belong to you. Some of it is fear of the different, the unknown.”

“How stupid, how provincial.”

“Yes, but calling names doesn’t change it. I even think these nations around Germany fear refugees because they fear the future for themselves.”

“You mean they’re afraid that someday Hitler or Franco—”

“Exactly. So the refugees are armies of Cassandras. They predict to each person, ‘Maybe you’ll be next.’ “

She nodded, and her eyes asked the next question before her lips could.

“Will it be the same in America?”

Just then the wash from a bigger boat slapped into the portside of the little steamer. Ilse had loosed her hold on the deck rail, and the sudden tipping made her lose balance. She fell to the deck in a sprawling mass, her tanned legs shooting up in the air.

Paul laughed cheerfully as he stooped to help her up. She waved him off, angry at his laughing, and reached out for the first support she could find. This handy prop turned out to be a fat knee covered by a plaid skirt. With the simplicity and trust of childhood, she began to hoist herself up along it.

The woman did nothing, until Ilse had regained her feet.

“Thank you,” Ilse said. “I fell down.”

The woman made no answer, disengaged the small hand still resting on her knee, and gave Ilse a small push away from her. For one appalled second, the child stared at her.

“Mommy, she pushed me, that woman shoved me,” she cried, and ran to bury herself against Christa’s skirts.

“Yes, darling, I saw.”

She wanted to strike the woman’s crass face, she wanted to shout horrible things in a public fishwife scene. But all her training, all her inhibitions, held her back.

She led Ilse to where Franz sat, leaning forward watching; she beckoned to Paul and he followed, looking over his shoulder with open curiosity at the woman in the blouse and plaid skirt. The woman stared back at him placidly.

“Daddy, what’s the matter with that woman?” he asked.

“She pushed me, she shoved me away from her,” Ilse repeated.

Franz shrugged his shoulders.

“Maybe she’s one of those strange people that don’t like children much,” he offered calmly. “There are people like that, you know—I am always sorry for them.” The children stared in disbelief. “Or maybe she never met any people from other countries, and she thinks that Englishmen and Americans and Austrians and Frenchmen aren’t as nice as the Swiss. That could be it, too.”

“But
why,
why aren’t they as nice?” Ilse was fascinated by this new idea.

“They are, of course. But sometimes when somebody has never traveled much, or met other kinds of people, they get the funniest ideas about them; Paul, don’t you remember you giggled so when that English doctor visited us?”