The Trespassers (45 page)

One more letter came from America, and then silence. The day after she had cabled, she had written and enclosed a copy of the whole Washington letter. He too was enraged at the calm reference to the Immigration Act of 1924—Zurich had omitted
that
detail. He had replied to her, he had written the Consulate once again, but so far there had been no answer from either place.

But it was only her silence that was extraordinary. He knew the schedules of every mail boat, and a dozen had come from America since the time he had expected her answer. Only once before, had she ever delayed. She might be ill once more…

The days crawled by. On the twenty-eighth, Madrid fell and the long war in Spain was done. His prodigious sorrow over its outcome was the newest whetstone on which his mind honed the steel of his private fears. He wrote once again to the Consulate, asking either for a personal interview or for further written word as to the status of their case now that his wife’s quota difficulty had at last been cleared.

But days went and again there was no answer. He knew the demand for visas must have reached panic proportions at Zurich and everywhere else. But his own anger could not cool down.

Then the letter came. “The Consulate General makes reference to your letter…” His eyes leaped ahead with greedy haste. “…proofs of the fortune which you pretend to possess.” (My God, “pretend,” still
pretend
?
)
“It is acknowledged that this fortune is a part of the fees of your American and British patients…If this is the case, this money should have been in your possession when you put in an application for a visa. The Consulate General would be obliged if you would offer an explanation why you did not mention it in your application on the place provided for it.

“From the files of the Consulate General, it is evident that only on May 25, 1938, did you mention for the first time that you were in possession of some money. He is very anxious to know why you delayed giving full information of the means which you pretend to have possessed at the time, since this question is of great importance to you and your family.”

He did not curse or shut or swear. He just stared at the letter in motionless disbelief.

The drop of water to drive a man mad. The anonymous threat on a scrap of paper. The slow, steady poison of suspicion. Was there some devious purposefulness in this incredible succession of delays and demands? Or was it merely an inefficiency so stupendous that one could not believe in its simple existence?

He rejected the first idea. Then it must merely be that a dozen clerks and Vice-Consuls, in turn, handled the correspondence that came in on visa cases, and that each one could know only a fraction of the history or the pertinent material on any given problem.

And the native caution of the underling must come into it, too.

Minor officials invariably avoided positive action and positive decisions. They knew they could get into difficulty only by deciding something, never by fobbing it off with a new question, sending another mimeographed from or another letter. Probably half of the delays, half the new demands in any visa case, came about, as simply as that.

This newest demand was in itself a simple matter to clear up. He had only to explain all over again in writing what he had explained nine months ago in person—what should be self-evident to any government official who knew the laws of the Third Reich about “a citizen’s money” in foreign countries. One didn’t write details on application blanks that would be handled by a dozen secretaries and clerks. The Gestapo had their agents everywhere, even among the stenographers and file clerks of foreign embassies and consulates. The American consular officials presumably knew that. They were not babes in arms.

But he would patiently go into it all once more.

And there would then again be weeks of delay. He couldn’t even fool himself into expecting this one point to be cleared with decisive speed.

Only Washington might force the speed. He thought then of cabling Vera Stamford. And instantly his deep unease about her rose again to the surface of his mind and emotions.

Still no word from her. It was six weeks since her cable. Six weeks of silence.

Only in emergencies could he now permit himself the cost of cabling. But all at once, the submerged concern for her pointed into a clamor to know the truth. She had become precious to them all.

BOTH WORRIED ABOUT YOUR SILENCE. ARE YOU AGAIN ILL?

He sent the cable and then wrote the Consulate. This time, he did not work his sentences into the decorous polish with which he usually wrote. In the very vigor of his explanation, his resentment showed through at being taken to task, as though he were a cheat or a scoundrel.

“…and it was clearly never my intention to conceal from you nor any trustworthy person the existence of my Swiss fortune. I refer you to the specific mention of it in Mrs. Stamford’s original affidavit, dated April, 1938…”

He reviewed the whole matter in minute detail. It should satisfy a two-year-old. But when he mailed it, unease still crawled about in the flesh of his mind. They would delay, waste precious time, find new loopholes—he knew now of cases where three years went by before visas were issued! Was theirs to be another such case?

There was an American mail going off the next day. He wrote to Vee to ask if she once again could help. If she were not ill, he thought, if there were some happier explanation of her silence, then let the letter be on its way.

Two days later a cable came from New York. It was signed “Benson.”

MRS. STAMFORD RECUPERATING FROM HOSPITAL ILLNESS. AM WITHHOLDING ALL MAIL UNTIL RECOVERY.

Christa read it with him. They were silent for some minutes. He saw in her face that she took this as personally as he himself did.

“Our one real friend in this whole terrible business,” Christa said slowly.

That night, after the children were in bed, the moment came. Franz knew its face instantly, as though he were long familiar with it.

He heard sounds from Christa’s room, and went in to find her sobbing. She began to speak, and immediately her words were violent, as if they had been boiling up within her for months.

“Let’s give it up, let’s forget it, don’t keep on in the face of what’s impossible,” she began. “Everything has gone wrong for us, from the first moment with these Americans. They don’t want us there, that is why they think up a new excuse every month to keep us here. Then let us be too proud to go there. Let us stay here where we are, until Austria is safe again.”

He went to her, but she gestured him away.

“No, no, don’t comfort me again, and tell me it will be done soon. I am not a child, to be petted back to smiling again. I hate this, I have hated this whole begging position we are in for months—a year it is now. I—”

“I hate it, too.”

“We are like beggars. You always have to explain one more thing, and prove one more thing. They treat us as if we were criminals. They don’t want us—they’re sick of foreigners in that whole country—they show us clearly they don’t want us. Have you no pride, to go on trying?”

“Pride. Stop that. That word—”

His voice brought her up sharp. It was strong, it was tough-fibered, it was not a voice that begs and cringes.

“No, no, I didn’t mean it for you,” she said. “I—oh, Franz, you are strong, but I—”

Sobs tore through her sentences. He knew pity for this torment before him. His eyes warmed and softened. But she did not see them. Her face was in her hands. That was the way she had talked to him that last night in Döbling, when the packing was done and they sat together in their living room for the last time.

“Why, why can’t we stay here? I can talk in my own language to my own countrymen here. I can’t begin all over again, and go to some new place.”

He waited until she had given him all the reasons. He knew every one she would adduce, every argument she would offer. But he waited until she had poured them out for him.

“Darling, Christl, to settle for ten or twenty years in a small vacation town? That is only a form of suicide, a kind of death to development and growth for the children, for you, for my work. You have seen what happens—”

“Don’t—you always know how to persuade me. But I don’t want to listen.” She shook her head again and again; her voice was throaty and out of control. “I am different, I tell you, I can’t go to that country where they don’t want us.
You
go—let me stay here in Europe where I belong. I’ll stay—”

He would have laughed at the fantastic notion, but her despair was too real.

“You’d better leave me behind, you’d better…”

He took her into his arms, and said nothing. He held her, until the explosion spent itself, until the tumbling debris of her words quieted down.

“You forget one thing, Christl,” he said softly at length. “You forget that we love each other, you forget that I love you too much to leave you, ever, for anything. Maybe you really forget some times?”

She clung to his body for answer.

“If you really mean this—if you tell me tomorrow seriously and calmly that you mean this, that you want me to notify the Consulate we have changed our minds and withdraw our applications—”

“Don’t—don’t torture me with such problems now. I
think
I mean it. But by tomorrow I will know it is bad for you and the children—”

“Maybe it’s the bad news today in the cable that depressed you so,” he said slowly. “Sometimes one more small disaster shatters one’s whole courage. But she is recuperating, it says so.”

“No, I felt very badly; she is like one of us now, but the cable couldn’t have anything to do with the way I feel about going there.”

Above her bowed head, he smiled. It couldn’t have anything to do, she thought. But an apparently irrelevant thing had everything to do with these climactic moments in living.

“Franz, believe it, I mean it, whenever I think how it will be there, I feel sure I can’t, I feel in my bones. I can’t.”

She calmed down in time. He knew that she would. He suggested walking to the inn, but she made tea for them both instead, and they sat in the small kitchen, drinking it together. At last she was ready for bed, and he lay talking in a low vice about other things so that she would not return to the subject which held so much fear and unhappiness for her.

But when she fell asleep, he went on thinking about what was happening to this woman of his. The long waiting had thinned out whatever determination she had had when they left Austria. Thinned it and weakened it to the breaking point. If they only knew, in all the consulates, in all the unwilling countries outside, what it did to the ordinary person to feel so unwanted.

Her words rang on in his mind. “I can’t. I feel in my bones I can t.”

V
EE’S CONTINUING SILENCE
astonished and baffled him. At last Jasper Crown had to face the fact that he had gambled and lost.

She had not telephoned. She had not written. The time had gone by, and there had been no word or sign from her.

He had really believed that as the weeks went by and she came to realize the full meaning of her headlong determination to “go on alone,” she would at last accept his judgment, his deepest conviction.

Now it was too late, forever too late. Now, on the first of March, there was no gamble any longer. There would be actual danger in stopping it now.

The last three weeks had been a hell of nerves for him. The constant argument within himself about whether he should call her and try once more or wait until she called him—he had worked himself into such a lather of tension that he could no longer get a decent night’s rest.

At the office, people had noticed the state he was in. Giles, in his hearty way, had twitted him about it.

“Jas, you’re killing yourself with this overwork. You’re shot to bits.”

“It’s not overwork; I don’t know what overwork means.” His voice was short; he couldn’t help snapping at everybody. Giles’ face darkened for an instant; then he shrugged.

“Well, if it’s not the work,” he said and his voice was jovial again, “then it’s a guilty conscience or something eating you. Take it easy, guy, will you?”

Jas had smiled, as well as he could. But fury had leaped alive at the words. God damn Giles’ platitudes.

And more days had gone, and more nights, and here it was March, and she had not telephoned.

He was at home. The broadcast over, he had gone right back to his apartment. He had stopped in at the hotel bar downstairs for a drink.

He was alone. He was always alone. He dined with people from the office, the stockholders, other business acquaintances; there were certain invitations from important people that he had to accept for the later part of the evening; there were his business trips and his night work at the office. Apart from that, he was always alone. There was no intimate content in his life at all.

That was better than being chained in the incessant bondage of marriage. But there were other choices for a man. Otherwise there arose all the pressures that made him restless and dissatisfied with everything. Face it; intimacy he wanted, love-making, sex. Not marriage. Maybe that had been true all along.

His mind kept going to Vee. He missed her and needed her, as Vee, as the girl she had been before—before—

He did not name it. But when he thought of her, when he missed her, it was the other Vee he missed. Not the one of that last miserable afternoon, but the earlier one, vivid, responsive, passionate.

He began to pace the room. On his desk was the clock with the dials. It was almost midnight. She would be awake still—he had often telephoned her even later than this.

But there was no use. It was too late now. It was a full week too late.

He picked up the receiver.

An odd excitement filled him. As he gave the switchboard operator her number, he felt a tremor of anticipation, as if he were a lad calling his first girl.

He didn’t know what he would say when he saw her. But he needed to see her. Right now. Tonight.