The Trespassers (32 page)

There had been a form letter acknowledging receipt of his communication. Beyond that there had been no reply whatever.

By the end of August he was fighting down his daily impulse to go there, demand attention, argue, curse, threaten. But he knew that one such scene might arrange the final destruction of whatever hope still remained on the Bahnhofstrasse. He stayed away.

Each day continued to be a heavy-footed jailer down the corridor of their interim prison. He was not yet concerned about the children. Cape Town, New York, Amsterdam—they turned equal, ears to each of them. Ilse was sometimes homesick for Hansi and her playmates in Döbling, but there was nothing unusual about her behavior or Paul’s. If they sensed that there was something strange in such an extended stay in Switzerland, they certainly seemed to be enjoying the sensation.

But Christa—she had become—she was—he could find no better word than “muted.” Since her one sharp outcry over the visas, there had been no further breakdown. There was no sharp reaction to anything. When the long letter came from Dr. Huebchen, they read it together, and he watched her face to see her reception of the glowing descriptions of life and opportunities in “The Union.” But at the end, she raised her eyebrows quizzically.

“He seems very important there, doesn’t he, all the things he is doing for us, with this big official and that?”

That was very shrewd of Christa. The same uneasiness he had felt over the cable arose from the flowing phrases and active energy of the letter.

“Perhaps he is really that important,” Franz said. “He makes it sound very desirable, doesn’t he?”

“My only desire is to find
somewhere,
she said, and again, though her voice was unchanged from its usual timbre, Franz thought of the word “muted.”

It was hard to pin down his feeling. She went about her daily life, the marketing, the orders to the maid Thilde, the daily reading to Ilse—and there was no notable change in the way she did it. She was troubled often with a headache, but she made no great complaint about it. Yet there was about her always an air of almost docile sadness. She sang the nursery songs Ilse asked for, but she never hummed in the kitchen. She talked about the growing crisis in Czechoslovakia, but she never exploded into rage about it.

The day after Dr. Huebchen’s letter had come, he told her he was cabling that they would sail the moment their permits were authorized and would be grateful if he expedited the action in any way he could. She looked at him thoughtfully. “You’ve given up all hope about the American visas, I see.”

“It doesn’t look as though they are reconsidering in our favor,” he answered. “I was—part of me was—afraid of that since I saw the Consul General. That’s why I have been so active in all these other directions.”

“Yes, I guessed that.”

A few days later she suddenly said, “He did not answer your cable?” and Franz could not conceal quickly enough his puzzled distress that it should be so. He cabled again, and once again there was no reply. The cable company reported that both cables had been delivered to his office address as directed. He volunteered this news to Christa, and a spasm of feeling crossed her face, but so quickly was it gone he could not interpret it. Later he felt that she really did not care very much, one way or another. She had no active dislike for the idea of South Africa, but she had no great liking for it either.

There were some few things she really enjoyed.

She liked to listen to him at the piano and she liked to take walks. Almost every evening, when the children were asleep, she would suggest that they go for a walk. The nights of late August were tinged with frost, but Christa enjoyed this nocturnal walking the more for that. Sometimes he would suggest a walk during the afternoon sunshine, but she always had some reason for refusing it. It was as though she felt safety in the darkness. That disturbed him, too.

A sudden storm caught them all on the first day in September, and the next day Christa had a severe chest cold. It was years since she had been so ill, and her fever-flushed face and bright eyes struck at his heart.

“Stay in bed today, Christl,” he said, expecting her to insist that there was no need.

“Yes, it will be nice to rest.”

“I’ll ask Thilde to plan to live here for several days. Do you think she can leave her own family?”

“I think so. She said if we ever needed her to let her know.”

By evening the fever had dropped nearly to normal. But the next morning Christa made no move toward leaving her bed. Paul and Ilse came to the door of her room, and talked to her from there; she answered them with calm sweetness.

“Mommy, you look so funny, lying in bed during the day,” Ilse said.

“Do I, dear?”

“Oh, she does not,” Paul said stoutly. “She’s sick, that’s all. If you’re sick you have to stay in bed.”

“That’s why I do,” Christa agreed. “I am sick. But not very. I’ll be better tomorrow.”

But the next day she reported to Franz that she felt shaky when she left her bed.

“I think perhaps one more day?” A note of pleading made the question important.

“Probably a good rest was what you needed,” he agreed at once. “Your voice sounds clearer, and you don’t need a handkerchief every minute.”

She smiled.

“You notice everything.”

“Of course.”

She was up the next morning before he awoke. He found her dressed and cheerful and quiet.

“I’m fine again,” she announced.

“Good, darling. Perhaps this week we’ll have some word.”

She shrugged.

“When do our Swiss permits run out?”

He had hoped she would overlook that. Each week that passed made him more aware of that date on their papers for Switzerland. Once the fifteenth of November had seemed off in the large distances of time. But no more. Ten weeks away. What were ten weeks in this procession of lost days?

“Oh, not for a long time. Don’t disturb yourself about that.”

“I just wondered.” She hesitated. “Franz—”

“Yes, darling?” He crossed the room, took her hand into his. “What is it? I know you are keeping something all to yourself. Why should you spare me from whatever it is?”

“I keep wondering about school. Suppose South Africa takes a long time, too. It is no good for children to study English with a tutor and learn nothing else.”

“I know. But it’s not serious for a little while, either.”

“Soon the other children here will be going back to school again. Paul and Ilse will know that there’s some reason they don’t.”

“That’s true. I’ve thought about it.”

“Why don’t we enter them?”

“Perhaps it would be best. Yet—I don’t like starting them and then breaking off in a few weeks.”

“A few weeks? You know it won’t be over in a few weeks.”

“
Don’t
sound so hopeless, Christa.” His voice was all at once impatient. “That makes it worse, the waiting. We may have a cable from Huebchen tomorrow.”

She shook her head and looked at him and her eyes filled.

“Don’t be angry with me, Franz. I can’t stand it if you turn against me, too.”

He apologized for his sharpness, but his words did not comfort her. She said nothing and the tears pooled up, spilled over, and ran down her face. She made no effort to wipe them away. He gave her his handkerchief. She took it and stared at it.

“I know I make it harder,” she finally whispered. “I am a handicap to your courage. Without me, it would be easier—”

“Nonsense. Darling, Christl dearest, that is the purest foolishness. You know it.” He swore again to guard his secret well. If she discovered it, the handicap idea would swamp everything else.

She smiled at him. If silence could be muted, her silent smile was muted.

That night, she looked exhausted. Once again her eyes gleamed with the alarming sheen of fever, her voice rasped. She said, in a surprised tone, “Why, I’m sick,” and went herself for the thermometer. When she read it, she handed it over to Franz.

He glanced at it and said, “Bed for you.”

She did not argue or resist. At the end of a week she was still in bed, but at last the tenacious cold lost its stubborn strength.

Franz tried in every way to soothe her, to comfort her. Even when she asked what news there was, he did a verbal editing of it before he told her.

But when Hitler spoke at Nuremberg, there was no way to keep Christa from turning to the radio to listen. She knew of it, as everyone knew of it, as Thilde knew of it, and the tradesmen in the village.

The despised voice came to them both, sitting in the small, cheerful parlor of their now-familiar house. Over his turgid, frantic words came the truculent menace of his boisterous audience. When the speech turned to the recital of the wrongs suffered by the Sudeten Germans, the voice spat with scorn and hatred. “
Ich spreche von der Czechoslovakei!
” He yelled threats, insults, roared on about the democratic principle of self-determination. That he would have. No man, no government, could deny him.

Even as Franz listened, he knew that if this monstrous thing happened, then his family, like millions of others, would be intimately affected by it. Even without war, new thousands, tens of thousands in Czechoslovakia and the countries around it, were already rushing to every consulate, seeking escape. He knew that as surely as if his eyes were watching them. He saw in Christa’s compressed lips that she knew it, too.

“Tomorrow, I will go to Zurich—to both consulates,” he said slowly. “I will cable Huebchen once again.”

But the next day, he went only to the British Consulate. The morning mail brought him a brief communication from the American Consulate. He tore it open with a swoop. The letter was addressed,
Herrn Franz Vederle und Kinder Paul
&
Ilse.
Christa was not mentioned. The message begged to inform him that further examination of his case would proceed in accordance with the usual practice of the Consulate General. When any further decision had been reached, he would be duly notified. It was signed by a Vice-Consul, after the closing,
Hochachtungsvoll, Für den General-konsul.
There was a finality about it.

He crumpled the sheet in rage. Then he smoothed it out again and read the brief sentences once more. He studied the address.

The last stubborn peg of hope there was hammered flat. Now the only chance lay with Cape Town.

Two days later, he turned on the radio—and for the first time, real fear struck at him. A flashed vision crossed his mind, a day nightmare, of himself and Christa and his son and sweet little daughter on a desert island in some endless sea, out of touch with any human being they knew, unreachable by any they had once known and trusted. They were gaunt, ragged, Ilse’s small face raddled with hunger.

He gasped at the trick his own mind had played. The next moment the nightmare was gone.

The Reuter’s dispatch went on. Even the trained radio manner jagged through with the inner excitement of this news.

For that very morning, the fifteenth of September at half-past eight o‘clock, a plane had taken off from the London airdrome. In it was an old man who was feeling for the first time the exalting sensation of, flight. But to Franz there was no exaltation in the news that England’s Prime Minister was flying to Germany’s Führer. It was an infamy—it could lead only to disaster.

Christa must be told. There was no way to protect her from history; he could spare her nerves on a hundred lesser plateaus, yes, and he did. But when the grave moments came to the world, there was no escape for the nervous ones, for the frightened ones, for the ones who prayed for decent, just days once more. Christa would know, as he did, that out of this truckling flight of dishonor could come nothing but catastrophe.

He went into Christa’s room. He told her, and she clasped her hands together against her throat. For long minutes she said nothing, only stared at him with unbelieving eyes as he gave her every detail he had heard.

“It is—this will be war,” she said at length. “We are caught, we are finished.”

“It may be. But I don’t know—I’m afraid not.”

“Afraid
not?
”

“I’m afraid they will give in to him rather than fight.”

“Oh, dear God, perhaps it is better—anything but war again.”

He shook his head and said nothing. She knew she had said the wrong thing, and she turned and went to the radio herself. She began searching for some station sending out news.

“Do you think they get upset like this in America?” she suddenly asked him.

In spite of himself, he laughed vigorously.

“I think that Americans are clinging to their radios this very moment just as the Czechs and the British and the French and you and I are doing over here.”

“It’s hard to believe. They’re so far away from everything.”

As day followed day, every report that came to their ears and eyes brought war closer. The government fell, General Syrovy headed the new one. Street fighting, mob violence spread; more than 250,000 Czechs were trying to cross the borders, in any direction. Then on the twenty-second, Chamberlain flew to Germany again. Meetings began—but no, now the Sudetens were not enough. Now, Hungarian and Polish claims had to be met as well. And quickly, sir.

Deadlock. Diplomatic notes, diplomatic silences, hour after hour of report and counterreport. The negotiations had broken down; no, they were continuing. The Czechs were being sent the new demands. They would reject them and fight. No, their allies would stand with them and fight. Two days later Chamberlain flying back to London. France mobilizing half a million men. England’s entire fleet ready, steam up. On the Czech frontier, a German army massed. The Belgian army mobilized, the Rumanian army mobilized. The Czechs had at last begun to mobilize.

And then the final blow. On the twenty-ninth, one more meeting—Hitler and Mussolini, Daladier and Chamberlain, meeting in Munich. Thirty minutes after midnight it was over. Czechoslovakia was torn apart. No gun had been fired, no battle fought, no drop of angry and honorable blood had been spilled.

Europe woke to the news on the last day of September. There would be no war. Treaties, pledges, promises—push them aside, they are troublesome; ignore them, betray them, and avert war for our time. In the United States, in Japan, in South America and South Africa—wherever men watched the advancing shadow of the future, they woke on that last day of September to the news from Munich. Fascist pulses leaped in triumph the world over. And the pulse of men who loved freedom beat with the slow, grim timing of new resolve.