Winds of War (37 page)

“Well, you won’t learn much from
Mein Kampf
. That’s just froth on top of the kettle.”

“Do you understand Hitler and the Germans?”

Slote lit his pipe and stared at the air for several seconds. Then he spoke, with a wry little smile of academic condescension. “I have an opinion, the result of a lot of study.”

“Can I hear it? I’m interested.”

“It’s a terribly long story, Byron, and quite involved.” Slote glanced around again. “Some other time and place I’ll be glad to, but -”

“Would you give me the names of books to read, then?”

“Are you serious? You’d let yourself in for some dull plodding.”

“I’ll read anything you tell me to.”

“Well, let me have your book.”

On the flyleaf of
Mein Kampf
, Slote listed authors and titles all the way down the page, in a neat slanted hand, in purple Polish ink. Running his eye down the list, Byron felt his heart sink at the unfamiliar array of Teutonic authors, each name followed by a heavy book title, some by two:

. . .
Treitschke - Moeller van den Bruck – Fries – Menzel – Fichte – Schlegel – Arndt – Jahn – Rühs – Lagarde – Lanebehn - Spengler
. . .

Among them, like black raisins in much gray dough, a few names from his contemporary civilization course at Columbia caught his eye:
Luther – Kant – Hegel – Schopenhauer - Nietzsche
. He remembered that course as a nuisance and a nightmare. He had passed with a D minus, after frantic all-night cramming of smudgy lecture notes from the fraternity files. Slote drew a heavy line, and added more books with equally forbidding authors’ names:

. . .
Santayana – Mann – Veblen – Renan – Heine – Kolnai - Rauschning
. . .

“Below the line are critics and analysts,” he remarked as he wrote. “Above are some German antecedents of Hitler. I think you must grasp these to grasp him.”

Byron said dolefully, “Really? The philosophers too? Hegel and Schopenhauer? Why? And Martin Luther, for pity’s sake?”

Contemplating the list with a certain arid satisfaction, Slote added a name or two as he pulled hard at his pipe, making the bowl hiss. “My view is that Hitler and the Nazis have grown out of the heart of German culture – a cancer, maybe, but a uniquely German phenomenon. Some very clever men have given me hell for holding this opinion.

They insist the same thing could have happened anywhere, given the same conditions: defeat in a major war, a harsh peace treaty, ruinous inflation, mass unemployment, communism on the march, anarchy in the streets - all leading to the rise of a demagogue, and a reign of terror. But I –”

The waiter was approaching. Slote shut up and said not a word while they were being served. Watching the waiter until he went out of sight, the Foreign Service man drank coffee and ate cake. Then he started again, almost in an undertone.

“But I don’t believe it. To me Nazism is unthinkable without its roots in German nineteenth-century thought: romanticism, idealism, nationalism, the whole outpouring. It’s in those books. If you’re not prepared to read every word of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, for instance, give up. It’s basic.” He shoved the book back to Byron, open at the flyleaf. “Well, there you are, for a starter.”

“Tacitus?” Byron said. “Why Tacitus? Isn’t he a Roman historian?”

“Yes. Do you know about Arminius, and the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Okay. In the year 9 A.D., Byron, a German war leader named Arminius stopped the Romans at the Rhine, once and for all, and so secured the barbarian sanctuary in the heart of Europe. It’s a key event in world history. It led finally to the fall of Rome. It’s affected all European politics and war to this hour. So I believe, and therefore I think you should read Tacitus’s account of the campaign. Either you go into these things, or you don’t.”

Byron kept nodding and nodding, his eyes narrowed and attentive. “You’ve read all these books? Every one?”

Slote regarded the younger man quizzically, gnawing his pipe. “I haven’t retained them as well as I should, but, yes, I have.”

“What you’re actually trying to tell me, I imagine, is to go peddle my papers, that this is a subject for Rhodes Scholars.”

“Not at all, but it is a hard subject. Now, Byron, I’m really overdue at the embassy. Are you or aren’t you coming with us? We fly to Oslo Thursday, and from there to London. Then we just take our chances - destroyer, freighter, ocean liner, maybe an airplane trip via Lisbon - whatever turns up.”

Byron said, “What are Natalie’s plans? She got kind of snappish with me toward the end, and wouldn’t talk much.”

Slote looked at his watch. “She was disagreeable and vague with me, too. I really don’t know.” He hesitated.

“I’ll tell you something else. You may not like it. You may not believe it. But it’s so, and possibly you’d be better off knowing it.”

“Go ahead.”

“I asked her about you, whether you planned to return to Siena. Her answer was, ‘Well, I hope not. I sincerely hope I never see Byron Henry again, and if you ever get a chance, please tell him so with my compliments.’ – You look surprised. Didn’t you have an argument before she left? I was positive you had.”

Byron, trying to compose his face, said, “Not exactly. She just seemed grouchy as hell.”

Slote said, “She was in a gruesome mood. Said she had a bad backache from all the train riding, for one thing. Very likely she meant nothing by it. I know she felt grateful to you. As indeed I do.”

Byron shook his head. “I can’t say I’ve ever understood her.”

Slote glanced at the check and said, tucking bright-colored marks under a saucer, “Well, look, Byron, there’s no time to discuss Natalie Jastrow. I’ll tell you this. I’ve had no peace of mind since the day I first met her two years ago, at a very stupid cocktail party on the Quai Voltaire.”

“Why don’t you marry her?” Byron said, as Slote started to rise.

The older man fell back in his chair, and looked at him for several seconds. “All right. I’m not at all sure I won’t, Byron, if she’ll have me.”

“Oh, she’ll have you. I’ll tell you what. I guess I’ll stay on here with my folks for a while. I won’t go to Oslo.”

Slote stood, holding out his hand. “I’ll give your passport and so forth to your father’s yeoman. Good luck.”

Byron said, shaking hands and gesturing at
Mein Kampf
, “I appreciate the lecture and the list.”

“Small return,” Slote said, “for services rendered.”

“Will you let me know,” Byron said, “if you get word before you leave Berlin about where Natalie went?”

Knocking out his pipe against his palm, Slote said, “Certainly,” and hurried off into the sidewalk crowd. Byron ordered more ersatz coffee and opened
Mein Kampf
, and the café band struck up a merry Austrian folk dance.

Chapter 16

During Victor Henry’s absence in the States, his wife had tangled herself in a romance; something she had not done in his much longer absences through almost twenty-five years. There was something liberating for her in the start of a war. She was forty-five. Suddenly the rules she had lived by so long seemed slightly out of date. The whole world was shaking itself loose from the past; why shouldn’t she, just a wee bit? Rhoda Henry did not articulate this argument. She felt it in her bones and acted on it.

Being an ex-beauty, and remaining pretty, she had always drawn and enjoyed the attention of men, so she had not lacked opportunities for affairs. But she had been as faithful to Pug Henry as he had been to her. She liked to go to church, her hymn-singing and prayers were heartfelt, she believed in God, she thought Jesus Christ was her Savior - if she had never gone deeply into the matter - and she was convinced in her soul that a married woman ought to be true and good. In the old Navy-wife pastime of ripping apart ladies who had not been true and good, she wielded well-honed claws.

Setting aside a trivial kiss here and there, only one episode in the dim past somewhat marred Rhoda’s otherwise perfect record. After an officers’ club dance in Manila, where she had soaked up too much champagne - Pug being out at sea in a fleet exercise - Kip Tollever had brought her home and had managed to get her dress off. Madeline, then a child troubled by bad dreams, had saved the situation by waking and starting to cry. By the time Madeline was comforted, Rhoda had sobered up. Relieved to be back from the brink, yet bearing Kip no malice, she had donned a proper housecoat and had amiably shooed him out of the house. That had been the end of it. No doubt Kip the next morning had been just as grateful to Madeline. Victor Henry was practically the last man in the Navy he wanted to risk angering.

Thereafter, Rhoda was always somewhat kittenish toward Tollever. Now and then she wondered what would have happened had Madeline not awakened. Would she really have gone through with it? How would she have felt? But she would never know; she did not intend to get that close to trouble again; the wine had been to blame. Still, there had been something titillating about being undressed by a man other than old Pug. Rhoda preserved the memory, though she buried it deep.

Dr. Palmer Kirby was a shy, serious, ugly man in his middle-fifties. After the dinner party for him, discussing the guests with Sally Forrest, Rhoda had dismissed him as “one of these ghastly BRAINS.” Just to be sociable, she had vainly tried her usual coquettish babble on Kirby over the cocktails. “Well, since friend husband’s away, Dr. Kirby, I’ve put you on my right, and we can make HAY while the sun shines.”

“Um. On your right. Thank you.”

That had almost been the end of it. Rhoda detested such heavy men. But he had happened to say at dinner that he was going next day to a factory in Brandenburg. Rhoda offered to drive him there, simply because she had long wanted to see the medieval town, and Kirby in a sense was her husband’s guest.

On the way they had a dull, decorous lunch at an inn. Over a bottle of Moselle, Kirby warmed up and started to talk about himself and his work. At an alert question she asked him - living with Pug, Rhoda had learned to follow technical talk - Palmer Kirby suddenly smiled. It seemed to her that she had not seen him smile before. His teeth were big, and the smile showed his gums. It was a coarse male smile of knowledge and appetite, far from disagreeable, but startling in the saturnine engineer.

“Do you really care, Mrs. Henry?” said Dr. Kirby. “I’d be glad to explain the whole business, but I have a horror of boring a beautiful woman.”

The smile, the words, the tone, all disclosed that the man had missed none of her coquetry; that on the contrary, he liked her. A bit flustered, she touched a hand to her hair, tucking the waves behind her small white ears. “I assure you, it all sounds fascinating. Just use words of one syllable as much as possible.”

“Okay, but you brought this on yourself.”

He told her all about magnetic amplifiers - “magamps,” he called them - devices for precise control of voltages and currents, especially in high power. Asking one adroit question after another, Rhoda soon drew out the key facts about him. At the California Institute of Technology he had written his doctoral thesis on electromagnetism. At forty he had decided to manufacture magnetic amplifiers on his own, instead of settling for an executive post at General Electric or Westinghouse, and security for life. The long struggle for financing had all but sunk him; it was just now paying off. War industries demanded magamps in quantity, and he was first in the field. He had come to Germany because the Germans were ahead of the United States in the quality of some components. He was studying their techniques and buying their nickel-alloy cores.

She also learned that he was a widower and a grandfather. He talked about his dead wife, and then they exchanged long confidences about their children’s faults and virtues. Like most men, Kirby loved to talk about himself, once over his shyness. His story of backbreaking money troubles and final big success so enthralled her that she forgot to be coy, and spoke pleasantly and to the point. Rhoda was most attractive, in fact, when she made the least effort to be. She was the kind of woman who can dazzle a man at first acquaintance by piling everything into the shop window: none of it forced or faked, but in sum nearly all she has to offer. Victor Henry had long since found that out. He had no complaints, though he had once imagined there must be much more. Palmer Kirby was hit hard by this maximum first impact. He ordered a second bottle of Moselle, and they got to Brandenburg almost an hour late. While he went about his business Rhoda strolled through the picturesque old town, guidebook in hand; and her mind unaccountably kept wandering to her little misconduct long ago with Kip Tollever. She was a bit dizzy from the Moselle, and it wore off slowly.

When they returned to Berlin toward evening, Kirby offered to take her to dinner and to the opera. It seemed quite natural to accept. Rhoda rushed home and began raking through her dresses and shoes, pushing her hair this way and that, wishing she could have gone to the hairdresser, hesitating over her perfumes. She was still at it when Kirby came to call for her. She kept him waiting for an hour. In girlhood she had always kept boys waiting. Pug had harshly cured her of the habit, for Navy social life began and ended by the clock, and he would not tolerate embarrassment by Rhoda. Keeping Palmer Kirby waiting while she fussed over herself was a delicious little nostalgic folly, a lovely childish self-indulgence, like eating a banana split. It almost made Rhoda feel nineteen again.

The mirror told her a different story, but even it seemed friendly to her that night: it showed shiny eyes, a pretty face, a firm figure in the sheer slip, and arms that were round and thin all the way up, instead of bagging above the elbow as so many women’s did. She sailed into the living room wearing the pink suit with gold buttons that she had bought to please Hitler. Kirby sat reading one of Pug’s technical journals. He took off big black-rimmed glasses and rose, exclaiming, “Well, don’t you look grand!”

“I’m awful,” she said, taking Kirby’s arm, “dawdling so long, but you brought it on yourself, asking the old girl out after a hard day.”