Winds of War (35 page)

Slote broke in, “I would report that as personal violence. In America circumcision at birth is routine.”

“I’m circumcised,” said Byron.

“So am I,” said the old clergyman.

In the rest of the waiting room the process of sorting out the Jews was over. People were glancing at the Americans, pointing and whispering. The SS men were gathered at the entrance, all except a stout bald one with gold leaf in his black lapels, who now approached the American party, pulled aside the officer, and murmured with him, glancing at Hartley. The officer, without a word, pushed through to Hartley, took his suitcase and undid the straps.

Slote said sharply, “Hold on, sir, this is not a customs point, and there’s no reason to search personal belongings -” But the officer, down on one knee, already had the bag open and was rummaging in it, spilling its contents on the floor. He came on the New Testament, turned it over in his hands with an expression half-astounded, half-sneering, and brought it to his superior officer. The bald man examined it, handed it back, and threw his hands in the air. “So,” he said in German, “in a hundred Americans, maybe not one. Why not? Any Jew would have been an idiot to come to Warsaw this summer. Come. The train is being delayed.” He walked off.

The SS man tossed the black book with the gold cross in the open bag, and rudely gestured at Hartley to pick up his belongings, stepping over the pile as though it were garbage. Scanning the other faces in the group, he stepped up to Natalie Jastrow and gave her a long amused scrutiny.”

“Well, what are you looking at?” she said, and Byron’s heart sank.

“You’re very pretty.”

“Thank you.”

“Rather dark. Your ancestry?”

“I’m Italian.”

“What is your name?”

“Mona Lisa.”

“I see. You step forward.”

Natalie did not move.

The officer grunted and begun turning the pages of the roster.

Slote quickly said, “She’s my fiancée. We’ll be married next month.”

The bald officer shouted from the entrance and waved at the SS man, who roughly handed the roster to Slote. “Very well. You love your Jews. Why do you refuse to take in ours? We have swarms.” He turned to Byron. “You’re the son of a naval officer, and yet you lie about a Jew! That fellow is a Jew.”

“He’s not, honestly,” Byron said. “I think Mark sort of looks like Dr. Goebbels. You know short, dark, with a big nose.”

“Dr. Goebbels? So.” The SS man glared at Hartley and Natalie, broke into a nasty laugh, and walked off.

A loudspeaker called out in German, “
All Jews to the restaurant. Everybody else to track seven and board the train.
”

The refugees went crowding out to the dark tracks. The Jews, a forlorn little group, straggled back to the dining room, with men in black surrounding them.

Soldiers halted the crowd at the train to allow diplomats aboard first.

Slote muttered to Byron, “I’ll take a compartment. You’ll see me at the window. Bring Natalie and Mark, and by all means Reverend Glenville and his wife.”

Soon, through billowing steam, Byron could see the chargé waving from inside the dimly lit train. Byron came aboard with the four others, in a suffocating crush, and found the compartment.

“Thanks,” Hartley whispered when they were all seated and Slote had slid shut the door. “A million thanks. Thanks to all of you. God bless you.”

“Leslie Slote is the man,” said the minister. “You did nobly, Leslie.”

“Nobly,” said Natalie.

Slote looked at her with a hangdog smile, as though not sure she was serious. “Well, I was on pretty good ground. They tried to get that information from me at Kantorovicz, you know, and couldn’t. They got it from all the others. That’s why the separation went so fast here. But why the devil did you make that Mona Lisa joke?”

“It was very risky,” the minister said.

“Idiotic,” Hartley said. They were talking in whispers, though the corridor was buzzing with loud talk the stationary train was hissing and clanging, and a public address system outside was bellowing in German.

“How about Byron and Dr. Goebbels?” Natalie said with a grin. “That was pretty neat, I thought.”

“Neither of you seems to understand,” Hartley said, “that these are murderers. Murderers. You’re like kids, both of you.”

Reverend Glenville said, “I’m not willing to believe that, Mr. Hartley. I know the German people. They have had a cruel, unjust system imposed on them, and one day they’ll throw it off. At bottom they are good.”

“Well, Stockholm ahoy,” Natalie said. “I admit one thing. I’ve lost all curiosity about Berlin.”

“You’ve got to get your passport back first,” Hartley said. His jolly face was carved in a hundred lines and creases of tragic bitterness. He looked extraordinarily old, inhumanly old: the Wandering Jew, in an American sports jacket.

The train started with a wrenching clang. Byron now pulled out the yellow envelope. The message, on a Wehrmacht official form, had these few English words: GLAD YOU’RE OKAY. COME STRAIGHT TO BERLIN. DAD.

Chapter 15

The long string of cars squealed into the Friedrichstrasse terminal in clouds of white vapor, clanking, slowing. Rhoda clutched Victor Henry’s arm and jumped up and down, to the amusement of the uniformed foreign ministry man who had escorted them to meet the train from Königsberg. Pug observed his smile. “We haven’t seen our boy in over a year,” he shouted above the train noise.

“Ah? Well, then this is a great moment.”

The train stopped, and people came swarming out.

“My GOD!” exclaimed Rhoda. “Is THAT him coming down those steps? It CAN’T be him. He’s a SKELETON.”

“Where? Where?” Pug said.

“He disappeared. Somewhere over there. No, there he is!”

Byron’s chestnut hair was very long and curly, almost matted; the bones stood out in his pale face and his eyes looked bright and enormous. He was laughing and waving, but at first blink his father almost failed to recognize this long-jawed sharp-chinned young man with the shabby clothes and raffish air.

“It’s me. This is
me
,” he heard Byron yell. “Don’t you even know me, Dad?”

Pug plunged toward Byron, holding Rhoda’s hand. Byron, smelling of wine, embraced him in a tight, fierce, long hug, scratching his father’s face with a two-day growth of bristles. Then he hugged and kissed his mother.

“Gad, I’m reeling,” he said, in a swooping note like Rhoda’s but in a rough baritone voice. “They’ve been feeding us on this train like hogs going to market. I just finished a lunch with three different wines. Mom, you look beautiful. About twenty-five.”

“Well, you look ghastly. Why the devil were you running around in Poland?”

The foreign ministry man pulled at Byron’s elbow. “You do feel you have been treated well, Mr. Henry? Dr. Neustädter, foreign ministry,” he said, with a click of heels and a crinkly smile.

“Oh, hi. Oh, irreproachably, sir, irreproachably,” Byron said, laughing wildly. “That is, once we got out of Warsaw. In there it was kind of rough.”

“Ah, well, that’s war. We’d be pleased to have a little note from you about your treatment, at your convenience. My card.”

Leslie Slote, ashen and distraught, came up with two hands full of documents and introduced himself to Victor Henry. “I’d like to call on you at the embassy tomorrow, sir,” he said, “once I’ve straightened things out a bit.”

“Come in any time,” Pug Henry said.

“But let me tell you right now,” Slote said over his shoulder as he left, “that Byron’s been a real help.”

Dr. Neustädter politely emphasized that Byron could go off in his father’s custody now and pick up his documents some other time; or he himself could look after Byron’s papers and drop them at Commander Henry’s office. “After all,” Neustädter said, “when it’s a question of a son rejoining his parents, red tape becomes inhumane.”

Rhoda sat beside her son as they drove to Grunewald, happily clutching his arm while complaining how awful he looked. He was her secret favorite. Rhoda had thought of the name Byron at her first glimpse of her baby in the hospital: a scrawny infant, blinking big blue eyes in a red triangular face; clearly a boy, even in the rolls of baby flesh. She thought the child had a manly romantic look. She had hoped he would be an author or an actor; she had even unclenched his tiny red fists to look for the “writer’s triangles” which, she had read somewhere, one could see at birth in a baby’s palm wrinkles. Byron hadn’t turned out a writer, but he did actually have, she thought, a romantic streak. Secretly she sympathized with his refusal to consider a naval career, and even with his lazy school habits. She had never liked Pug’s nickname for the boy, Briny, with its smell of the sea, and it was years before she would use it. Byron’s switch to fine arts at Columbia, which had thrown Pug into black despondency, she had silently welcomed. Warren was a Henry: the plugger, the driver, the one who got things done, the A student, the one with his eye on flag rank and every step up toward it. Byron was like her, she thought, a person of fine quality, haunted and somewhat disabled by an unfulfilled dream.

She noticed the scar on his temple, touched it in alarm, and asked about it. He began narrating his odyssey from Cracow to Warsaw, interrupting himself now and then to exclaim at things he saw in the streets: red vertical swastika banners massed around a statue of Frederick the Great, a band of Hitler Youth marching past in their brown shirts, black neckerchiefs, and short black pants, nuns bicycling down the Friedrichstrasse, a band concert in a park, a turning merry-go-round. “It’s so peaceful, isn’t it? So goddamned peaceful! Dad, what’s happening in the war? Has Warsaw surrendered? Have the Allies gotten off their tails yet? The Germans are such liars, you never know.”

“Warsaw’s still holding out, but the war there is really over. There’s a lot of talk about peace in the west, too.”

“Honestly? Already? God, will you look at that café? Five-hundred Berliners if there’s one, eating pastry and drinking coffee, laughing, talking. Ah, to be a Berliner!

“Where was I? Oh yes. Well, anyway, at this point, see, the water pump gave out and the fan belt broke. The German planes never stopped going by overhead. The bride was having hysterics. We were twenty miles from the nearest town. There was a cluster of farmhouses about a mile down the road, but they’d been bombed to pieces, so –”

“Farmhouses?” Pug broke in alertly. “But the Germans keep claiming loud and clear that the Luftwaffe is attacking only military targets. That’s a big boast of theirs.”

Byron roared with laughter. “What? Dad, the military targets of the Germans include anything that moves, from a pig on up. I was a military target. There I was, above the ground and alive. I saw a thousand houses blown apart out in the countryside, far behind the front. The Luftwaffe is just practicing on them, getting ready for France and England.”

“You want to be careful how you talk here,” Rhoda said.

“We’re in the car. That’s safe, isn’t it?”

“Sure it is. Go on,” Pug said.

He was thinking that Byron’s story might turn into an intelligence report. The Germans were indignantly complaining about Polish atrocities, and publishing revolting photographs of mutilated “ethnic Germans” and Wehrmacht officers. By contrast, they offered photographic proof of happy captured Polish soldiers eating, drinking, and doing folk dances; pictures of Jews being fed at soup kitchens, waving at the cameras and smiling; and many photographs of German guns and trucks rolling past farmhouses and through untouched towns, with jovial Polish peasants cheering them. Byron’s tale cast an interesting light on all this.

On and on Byron talked. At the Grunewald house they went into the garden. “Hey, a tennis court! Great!” he exclaimed in the same manic tone. They sat in reclining chairs, drinks in their hands, as he described the siege of Warsaw with extraordinary clarity, picking out details that made them see and hear and even smell the whole thing - the dead horses on the streets, the tank traps and the menacing sentries at the corners, the unflushed toilets at the embassy when the water main broke, the gangs trying to put out roaring fires in a whole block of buildings with buckets of sand, the taste of horsemeat, the sound of artillery, the wounded piled in the hospital lobby, the façade of a synagogue slowly sliding down into the street, the embassy cellar with its rows of canvas cots, the eerie walk across no-man’s-land on a quiet dirt road dotted with autumn wild flowers. The blue-gray Berlin evening drew on, and still Byron talked, getting hoarse, drinking steadily, and losing no coherence or clarity. It was an astonishing performance. Again and again the parents looked at each other.

“I get famished just talking about it,” Byron said. He was describing the startling feast laid out by the Germans in the Klovno railroad station. “And there was another spread just like it when we got to Königsberg. They’ve been stuffing us ever since on the train. I don’t know where it all goes to. I think in Warsaw I must have digested the marrow out of my bones. They got hollow and they’re just now filling up again. Anyway, when and where and how do we eat?”

“You look like such a tramp, Byron,” Rhoda said. “Don’t you have any other clothes?”

“A whole big bag full. Mom. It’s in Warsaw, neatly labelled with my name. Probably it’s ashes by now.”

They went to a small dark little restaurant off the Kurfürstendamm. Byron laughed, pointing to the flyspecked curling cardboard sign in the window: THIS RESTAURANT DOES NOT SERVE JEWS. “Are there any left in Berlin to serve?”

“Well, you don’t see them around much,” Pug said. “They’re not allowed in the theatres and so forth. I guess they’re lying pretty low.”

“Ah, to be a Berliner,” Byron said. “Warsaw’s alive with Jews.”

He stopped talking when the soup came. Apparently his own voice had been keeping him awake, because between the soup and the meat course his head nodded and dropped on his chest. They had trouble rousing him.

“Let’s get him home,” Pug said, signalling to the waiter. “I was wondering how long he’d last.”

“Wha? Less not go home,” Byron said. “Less go to the theatre. The opera. Less have some civilized fun. Less do the town. Ah, to be a Berliner!”