The Trespassers (49 page)

She stayed a week. It was a queer, variable week of shifting mood and color. Some of its hours had an easy, sunny simplicity, when they took walks or drives through the luxuriant countryside, when they sat listening to Franz playing Brahms ballades and Bach preludes and fugues, playing Beethoven and Schumann and Mozart. And then would come hours when she guessed that Christa and Franz as well were caught in an aching tension about their future; that they were both tormented by their exasperating inability to plan with certainty, to measure the time that would elapse before they could find themselves a permanent status once more. Never before had she realized so intimately that “the stateless” live always with the sensation of being lost and adrift; never before had she known how safe, how precious, it was merely to know you were a citizen of a nation.

And she realized other things, as the mornings and afternoons and evenings unrolled, and the veil of first strangeness was lifted between them all. She knew that Christa was afraid, that under her quiet smile and speech lay fear. It was only through small clues that she detected the truth about Christa, but she was sure it was truth.

“Are all those American girls,” Christa asked suddenly one morning, “so—chic and—and so—their life controlling—like you, Vee?”

“Oh, my clothes,” Vee answered with a shrug. “I’m in the fashion business, so I have to pay attention to them.”

“But you about everything are so—so with ease. You travel by yourself—you—always American women are so—so—”

For a moment Vee was silent. Then she put her hand on Christa’s arm.

“Don’t be nervous about America,” she said gently. “It’s a wonderful country, you will see.”

Christa nodded slowly. “But I think—it must be now—they hate every foreigner there. Like all the countries.”

Vee’s heart contracted as she saw the look in the blue eyes. This year had humiliated Christa, frightened something in her.

Things as small as that were clues enough. Franz had fears too, but his were the fears anyone would have who had seen the hundred obstacles that could lie unsuspected between the application for visas and the moment one finally received them.

“July. The new American quota begins on the first of July,” he said in a reflective, dubious way one evening. “But maybe the Consulate will then present us with some new delays for several months; how can one know anything about it?”

“But they said officially the visas
would
be granted,” Vee said.

“Yes, I know.” He smiled ruefully. “Just the same, when I withdraw now some moneys for living expenses, and the bank balance grows always less, I pray they don’t suddenly raise some new question about my resources. For now some Vice-Consul would look at my bankbook and make surely the great discovery that I have no forty thousand francs but only thirty-two thousand. Ergo, I am a fraud, a cheat, a falsifier of documents.”

Vee did not smile in return. He was exaggerating, yes; but there was enough sickening possibility in his words…

“
He’s
afraid something will still happen to keep them in Europe,” she thought. “But Christa is just afraid. That’s different.”

“It will be over soon, Franz,” she said aloud. “The whole visa thing is—it’s not the way America is.”

“You wrote me once, ‘We’re not all like that,’ ” he said. He tilted his head a little to one side, and studied the cigarette he held in his hand. Then his eyes raised to hers. “That letter I remembered many, many times this year.”

The days and evenings passed, and Vee saw into their hearts and understood how it must be. Even their two children, safe with their parents as so many of Europe’s children no longer were, even these two tanned, healthy children were not really untouched by the year they had been through.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Paul?” she asked him idly once, while he rowed her along the shore in the old boat that went with the house.

He looked quite solemn for a moment.

“I shall like to be that man in the Consulate,” he replied, “that gives out the visas.”

It caught her heart. A child’s sense of ultimate glory, of the full magnificence of strength and power. It wasn’t funny. Oh, it was anything but funny.

T
HEY MISSED HER WHEN
she had left them. Franz and Christa said so to each other a dozen times in the first days after she was gone. In some odd way she had made America seem closer, more definite. It was more than her American speech, her easy American friendliness, her American point of view. That had done part of it. But she had clearly liked them, she had taken them to her heart—and somehow, while she was there, she seemed a living symbol of her country. America would take them to its heart, too.

But when she was gone, a blankness settled down in her place. She was within reach, yes—she had promised to keep them always informed of her changing addresses so they could reach her easily and quickly if the need arose. They could even telephone her now. In England or on the Continent she would be near.

But they missed her. Now there was again only the waiting for the days and nights to pass until the new quota year should begin. The news on the radio, the news in the papers, the contents of letters which they received or which their fellow exiles in Ascona received and reported—all piled up day by day a dozen new, a hundred new, bits of evidence of the precarious race they were running with time and with the tightening resistance of the world toward the stranger.

One day Christa held out to Franz
Das Neue Tagebuch,
the anti-Nazi paper published in Paris. The hand offering it trembled and the pointing finger zigzagged over the item she wanted him to read.

It was a report about a refugee ship, the Hamburg-American
St. Louis.
Nine hundred and seven refugees, fortunate ones with proper landing permits and papers, had embarked on her for Cuba. Most of them hoped to wait there until their American visas were issued to them. But after they had put to sea from Europe, Cuba issued a new decree. Any refugee for Cuba must receive a special permit from her Department of Labor, her Department of State, and her Treasury before leaving a foreign port.

On May 29, the S.S.
St. Louis
had arrived there with its nine hundred travelers. They had never heard of the new decree. They were not permitted to land. All pleas to Cuba failed. Individuals wrote and cabled; the Joint Distribution Committee offered to post $450,000 in guarantee bonds that they would not become public charges. But Cuba remained firm. Cuba already houses three thousand refugees from Germany and that is enough. The S.S.
St. Louis
finally nosed about and was now once more on the Atlantic, headed back for Europe, headed back for the concentration camps and firing squads of Germany. Her nine hundred passengers were still upon her, except for those who committed suicide rather than return.

Franz read the story. His hands did not tremble. He remembered the S.S.
Cap Norte
, bearing a small group of refugees for Paraguay, and the S.S.
Monte Olivia,
bound there also with another small group. The refugees on both ships had their visas for Paraguay. But to get to inland Paraguay one must pass through Uruguay. They had no visas for Uruguay, so they were not permitted upon her soil. The two ships had been sailing the wide seas off South America since the last week in April.

And he remembered other tales he had read but never told Christa. The refugee camp on the German-Polish border, with five thousand starving people thrown out of Germany and then refused entry to Poland; the two thousand refugees bound for Palestine during the winter just passed, and ice-blocked for weeks on the Danube in Rumania; the stranded boatloads of three thousand refugees in the Greek islands and in Syria…

He had read or heard of them all. These and a dozen other pieces of like news he had kept to himself, footnotes to the new document of the twentieth century. Now he had not been quick enough, and Christa had seen this newest story. He forced himself to meet her eyes. Panic stood large in them.

“If such a thing happened to us,” she cried, “I would—I—oh, Franz, I tell you I would rather—”

Her voice trailed off. He did not answer at once. The old desires to go to Zurich, to shout, yell, curse at any and every official he could see there flooded into his heart. But he knew—he knew. He had not the freedom for that; anger was a coin no immigrant could spend openly. Now they were so near the end, he counseled himself. Another ten days and the new quota year would begin.

It was one minute past midnight, on the first of July, 1939. Now again the ones with their dreams centered in the United States could see in their minds the unfilled pages, the empty ledgers, of the quota books at all the consulates.

Now again, none but the highest officials could know the true ratio between the expectancy and the chance.

One year before, at this very moment of midnight, the high officials knew that 139,163 Germans and Austrians were registered and waiting for the 27,370 American visas that could be issued in the next twelve months. Now they knew that the number registered and waiting was 309,782, and that the quota was full until 1950—one year before, at this very moment, the officials knew that 18,642, Czechoslovakians were registered and waiting for the 2874 visas that could be issued in any year. Now they knew that 51,271 Czechs waited and that the American quota was full until 1957.

Twelve months ago, the officials knew that 41,949 Poles were registered and waiting for the 6524 possible visas the United States could issue. Now there were 115,222 Poles waiting and the quota was full until 1956.

And the Hungarian quota, the quota that Franz Vederle bore so long in his very heart—one year ago 12,262 Hungarians raced for the 869 visas that would go to the first who qualified for them. Now the officials knew that 32,836 Hungarians waited and that the quota was oversubscribed until 1976.

Full, full, if never another German or Austrian, never another Czech or Pole, should go into an American Consulate in Berlin or Stuttgart, in Prague or Vienna or Warsaw, in the desperate months that lie ahead for Europe, these quotas are hopeless for eleven, seventeen, thirty-seven years…

From these four countries alone, there were 509,111 Christas and Pauls and Ilses and Franzes and Januçes and Celviks and Esthers and Ottos—over half a million registered and waiting for the precious visa stamp of the United States, land of asylum to the persecuted, to the political or religious outlaws of the world. And for those 509,111, there now opened 37,637 new chances, spaced tidily of course over the next twelve months.

The high officials knew, and some of them hated the impasse as personally as if they themselves and their own families were blocked by its awful dimensions. But there were also the officials who were aloof, untouched by the clamor, vexed by the endless surge. Damn foreigners, anyway. What makes them want to travel? Why do they have to go rushing toward the United States?

One moment, official. Look at your ledgers for England, for the year just passed. See the 65,721 American visas that may be issued yearly to Great Britain and North Ireland under the quota? Yes, but only 3604 English and Irish left their homes last year and crossed the great Atlantic to settle in the United States. There’s freedom there at home, there are safety and liberty there for a man’s beliefs, and so 62,117 American visas went begging.

And look at your lists for Norwegians and Frenchmen, for Danes and Belgians and Hollanders and the citizens of Eire—look at the visas that were never used from last July to this.

Look, but do not report what you find to the half million frantic ones on the German and Czech waiting lists, on the Hungarian and Polish. And do not tell it either to the 146,242 from other countries who also are already registered and waiting. Do not confide to them that in the year just ending, out of America’s possible grand total of 153,774 quota visas for all the nations, 94,921 were never issued at all.

No, do not breathe it. For these desperate ones might then plead, pray, curse, implore you in this time of crisis to transfer the unused visas to the packed pages where their names hopelessly stand. They might cry out to you, “But here are nearly a hundred thousand you could shift to us from last year—and what of the unfilled quotas from the years before and this year to come?”

And then you could not laboriously explain how the quota for each nation was long ago fixed and established, that it could not be held over from year to year, could not be shifted from nation to nation, could not be mortgaged in advance.

No, you could not undertake to go into all that. All you could say for answer would be, “That cannot be done. It is the law. It is the immigration law.”

It was not always the law. There was a time when there were no quotas, no visa reservations, no waiting lists. There was a time when the United States, like France, like England, and every other civilized nation, stood open to all who journeyed toward it.

There was then upon the earth one freedom that has almost vanished from the lives of men, the freedom to leave one soil and set foot upon another, to live where one chose to live and work where one chose to work. Even the poor had this freedom—the potato farmer and the coal miner, the factory hand and the carpenter. Anyone who could scrape passage to some near or distant land once had this profound and ancient freedom.

In the United States, the first moves to restrict that freedom came in the middle of the last century, came from labor itself. The California Workingmen’s party and the young Knights of Labor agitated against the evils of cheap “coolie labor” and demanded, not equal wages for the Chinese, but exclusion. By 1868, the demand was so strong that the Federal Congress proclaimed the “right of expatriation” to be a “natural and inherent right of all people.” But the agitation spread, and in 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. The restriction of the lesser Japanese immigration came much later.

Also in 1882 the first law restricting general immigration was enacted. It excluded the disabled, the lunatic and diseased, those likely to become public charges. Even the humane could not quarrel with this law, except for the explosive potential within it.