The Trespassers (56 page)

“Do you think it
is
helping?” she asked. Both men kept from a direct reply. Dr. Jacquerin looked tired, but Franz looked ill himself. She knew he had slept only in snatches since they had sailed. For the past two days he had never left the cabin. Every few hours she came in to hear his reports.

“Franz, go to my cabin now, and rest for a few hours. I will call you if—if—”

“No, I’d rather be here.”

From the bed the short breaths continued. Vee thought she heard a faint, thin ripple in them, like a small bubble, but she could not bring herself to speak about it. Dr. Jacquerin nodded to Franz, and he nodded back. They were hearing it, too.

Then the ship’s doctor left them, and they were alone with Christa. Whatever sedatives they had given her seemed to be wearing off, for she stirred, restless, uneasy.

“We try to stretch the oxygen,” Franz said. “It gives her relief for the time.”

Christa opened her eyes a little. Her lips moved.

“It is better—to leave—me—behind,” she said so slowly that Vee could understand the German words, “and take—the children there—you—are strong enough to stand it there—but I—” The voice fell away. Vee drew a sharp breath and tiptoed to the door.

“No, darling, I will never leave you,” he was saying. “We will all stay together always…”

She did not hear any more, but her eyes blinded with tears and she went to her cabin. She looked down at Ilse, sleeping with the eternal look of trust that lies upon the faces of children when they sleep. Ilse’s small face, so like her mother’s with its tiny, blunt nose and chin, was circled by her small arms, thrown up around her head. This little Ilse did not know, as Paul knew, what was actually happening, what was waiting to be decided. Vee stood staring down at her, at the open palms, at the whole beautiful, unaware thing of childhood. Her throat tightened and she turned away.

When she was in bed, there was a knock on the door, a rubbing sound more than a firm knock. She called out softly, and the door opened.

“I couldn’t fall asleep again, Vee,” Paul said. “I had a bad dream and then I couldn’t fall asleep.”

He looked younger than the twelve years he was so proud of, as he stood there in crumpled pajamas, a dressing gown thrown carelessly about him, and his feet bare. She made a gesture and he came to sit on her bed. She told him that his mother seemed to be responding a little to the oxygen they were giving her, that she had more color and seemed a little better.

Suddenly he put his head down against her, and her arms went out to cradle him.

“I’m awfully scared, Vee,” he said. “I’m just awfully scared. I can’t help it.”

“Try not to be, Paul darling. Just try.”

“I do try. But—oh, Vee, I know she’s going to die, and—and you don’t know how it feels.”

She found herself rocking his shaking body back and forth, as if she knew how to be a mother without ever having learned. She stroked his hair and comforted him in the only way she could, with small, meaningless sounds that told him she was unhappy with him. After awhile, she suggested that he stretch out at the other end of her bunk, and he lay down on top of the bedclothes. She covered him with her dressing gown and turned the light out. In the morning, he was still there, still asleep.

She dressed quickly and went to their stateroom. There was little change. From where she stood, just inside the door, she could hear the hard, short breaths, the moist, rippling sound. Franz had slept for an hour at two different times during the night; he was un-shaved and haggard. They would use oxygen again soon; the fight was not lost yet.

The long hours of the sixth day crept by. On the deck with the children, in the dining room, in the lounge, she listened to the newest reports of the seething crisis in Europe and was torn by the distant tragedy and the one in the cabin below until she thought she would scream out in this double stress. She read to Ilse, she talked to Paul, she told both children a dozen small stories about her own life as an American child. And all the while she knew that for Paul at least there was no deep listening possible except for the periodic reports about his mother. When the two children were at last asleep, she was spent with strain.

She knew that in the late afternoon the two doctors had decided on the first injection of morphine, and then a little later on another. In the middle of the evening, Dr. Jacquerin came to find her. He shook his head.

“Is she—is there any chance?”

“The edema is rising—the blueness of the lips and skin—” He broke off, and she waited. “I have seen some people fight through worse cases.” Again he paused. “The will to live, if it is there—”

At midnight, she went to the cabin. Again the oxygen mask was in place. From the chair in which he sat, Franz looked up at her. He said nothing. She stood beside him for a moment. Then she put out a hand and touched his shoulder.

“If you need me—I will go now, Franz, but if you need me for anything—”

He nodded slowly, and she left. In her cabin, she lay down, fully dressed. She knew she could not sleep. She tried to read, but it was impossible to follow the meaning of the printed words. At two o‘clock, she went out into the dim corridor, and on to the small lounge by the stair well. She saw a news bulletin on the board, and she read it, to see if further items had been added since last she looked. The earlier headlines were still there to tell in the pale light of the sudden sixteen-point German demand on Poland, of Berlin’s command that a Polish envoy be sent there within twenty-four hours, of England’s stony query, “Is this an ultimatum?” These she had read earlier in the evening. One new item had appeared. It read, “31, August; 23:50 Paris Time: D.N.B. (German News Agency) claimed tonight that bands of Polish irregulars had invaded German soil at three points.”

In plunging bitterness, Vee almost cried out at the words. So Germany had been invaded; so Germany would fight to protect herself from the treacherous attack. She turned away. Now, more than before, the very thought of going to sleep was a cynicism beyond her. She went up to the promenade deck and began to walk. It was empty except for a few stragglers in evening clothes come out from the dance floor to look at the sea and sky. For a long time she walked, and sat in a deck chair to smoke, and then rose to walk again. When she finally was too tired to remain, she glanced at her watch, and saw that it was almost four.

She went down, went “without plan toward the Vederles’ cabin. There, she stood outside the closed door, uncertain. Then she carefully turned the handle, opened the door a crack. A thin light was in the room: A sound came to her ears. Noiselessly she opened the door another inch. In the chair by the bed Franz sat, crouched forward, his elbows on his knees and his head buried deep into the crook of his crossed arms. His body shook as he sobbed.

A hundred instincts called to her to go to him in his grief. For a second or two, she stood, irresolute and shaken. Then, as noiselessly as she had opened it, she closed the door. Outside, she tried to think what she must do. Her good mind seemed to fail her; she could not decide on any step. In the dim corridor, she stood, trying to sort out the ideas that swarmed into her mind…Paul…Ilse. No, not now, let them sleep on. Then she began to move toward the stair well. Slowly she climbed the carpeted stairs to A deck and went to the end cabin. She knocked softly several times before Dr. Jacquerin opened the door and peered out.

“Mrs. Vederle died,” she whispered. “I think you ought to go down there.”

He stood, nodding. Then he closed the door, and she stood again irresolute. A moment later, he came out in a bathrobe and slippers. Wordlessly they started down the passageway together, down the stairs. At the landing on D deck she stopped, and he looked at her inquiringly.

“You go,” she said. “I don’t…I will wait in my room.”

Inside, she looked down once more at the upflung palms and the untidy blond hair of the six-year-old child. Then she began to cry, with no sound. Tumbling through her mind went the words Jacquerin had spoken earlier that night, “The will to live, if it is there…” And looking down at Ilse, seeing Paul as he had stood in her doorway last night, young and frightened, she felt a phrase begin to revolve in her mind, like a somber pinwheel. “It needn’t have happened; it needn’t have happened; it needn’t have happened.” Back in Ascona she had got the first clues, then in Paris she had been sure. Christa was afraid; the world had made her too afraid.

She lay down then. When the tapping came at last on the door, the porthole stood out gray in the cabin. Instantly she was free of the thin sleeping that had briefly claimed her. Still fully dressed she opened the door. Franz was there. He stood tall and erect.

She went out and closed the door behind her. They stood facing each other there; she put a hand out to him and he took it into both of his. He gripped it hard, as if there were support there that he needed.

“You know. Jacquerin said you knew,” he said finally.

“I—oh, Franz—I don’t know how to tell you—”

“No. I—” He stopped and his eyes filled. “This had to be—I think, partly at least, this had to be. The way it was for her all that time, I mean, this had to be.”

Behind them, up the passageway, some sudden clamor arose. Then a steward came toward them, half running, saying something as he came. They saw the excited face, heard the hoarse voice.

“They bombed Warsaw this morning at five o‘clock; at daybreak there they began to bomb Poland. The war has begun. My God, the war has started.”

The squadrons of Nazi bombers roared across the borders, across the frontiers. They need no visas; their quotas are limitless. Instead of life and talent and beauty, in place of ideas and research and manuscripts, they carry slavery and death to other men’s lands. For them there are no locked doors, no guarded gates; for them the open paths are limitless.

Now in the months to come, there would be under their roaring wings such a flight of humankind as Europe’s earth had never seen. Only far off there in the East, where thirty millions had fled through the endless miles of China, only there had the numbers reached such titanic totals as were yet to mount across half the surface of Europe.

But soon the massive chaos would erupt in the West. In a few days now, a million war refugees will glut every road that leads from Poland; later other millions will fight and struggle along the snowy roads of Finland and Estonia and Latvia and Rumania; in the soft spring the terrible rivers of humanity will flood through Belgium and Holland and Denmark, and in early summer, other millions will choke and knot the long roads southward through France…

This would, for the most part, be that other kind of flight—not the escape from scorn and persecution, nor the search for a permanent home in a foreign land. This would be instead the purely physical fleeing from the crashing shell and the exploding bomb. Yet in no future would these new headlong millions be able to remain truly aloof from the word “refugee.” Never again in all of time would their minds be blank of the image, drained of the remembering.

Perhaps in the bitter months that lie ahead, and in the nights when the dreaming begins of the dear safety of home, perhaps a new fellowship will begin to form. Perhaps there will be born in many of these sad and frightened hearts a new tie with any human anywhere who must pack up swiftly all the years of his life and carry them with him to a lonely place he does not know. And if this new, intimate compassion were to stir into life, then it might one day bear the great fruit of kinship with the harassed and driven of the world.

There will be need for the kinship, need for the tie. This morning the planes roared through the dawn. There are no ears too deaf to hear
this
music; there are no minds which can still think that the Nazi and the Fascist attack only some soft liberals, some stubborn ministers and scientists, some religious or racial minorities.

Not this morning, not in any land that still speaks the word of freedom. Now the great issue, like the great fugue, has at last been squared.

In the busy waters of the Lower Bay, the small ship moved slowly toward the harbor. Along the deck rails were the eager homecomers and the wondering foreigners, watching the gray fog for the first sight of the city. Vee stood forward, looking into the mist ahead, hearing the sounds of the small boats making their cautious way through the dull gray.

A little apart, Paul and Ilse sat together on the top step of the metal gangway to the deck below. They had come to her yesterday, as Franz had come, for whatever comfort her love could give them. But they were shy of her now; they seemed to want to stay apart in some communion of their own. She saw that Paul held Ilse by the hand, as if he were leading her. Their faces were rested, almost free of the marks of their yesterday. Franz had given them both sedatives to guarantee a quiet night. She had not yet seen him this morning. But she knew about the burial at sea in the first hour of daylight, while the children still slept. He had wanted to be alone then, and only a ship’s officer and two of the crew had been there with him.

Until yesterday, she had never been close to the grief of children. When the time came, after Franz had been closeted with them in the stateroom where they had last seen their mother lying ill, he had sent a steward to ask her to come. She had known they would suffer, she had known they could not have learned yet to control and conceal that suffering. But she had never imagined the look that would be on them, lost, unbelieving and lost. They both clung to Franz, Ilse in his lap, crumpled against him, Paul sitting on the floor, holding to his father’s knees, as if they each would keep him physically in their grasp. She said nothing for a while, until they turned to her, and then she tried to comfort them and knew that for a time there could be no comfort.

But then at last they were quieter; later had come the ordinary imperatives of hunger and the need to move about, and the long day at last came to its close. She had seen Franz fight through all of it to remain steady for these two children who needed his steadiness, but she had also seen the tears that filled his eyes when he could no longer prevent them. She had seen grief and love, and dimly she knew that they were kinder than the grief and hate she had once known.