Winds of War (4 page)

I’ve written about you to Dr. Aaron Jastrow, who lives outside Siena. You know of him. He wrote
A Jew’s Jesus
, made a pot of money, and got off the miserable academic treadmill. We used to be friends at Yale, and he was very good indeed at bringing out the best in young men. Go and talk to him, and give him my regards.

That was how Byron happened to call on Dr. Jastrow. He took a bus to Siena, a three-hour run up a rutted scary mountain road. Twice before he had visited the bizarre little town, all red towers and battlements and narrow crooked streets, set around a gaudy zebra-striped cathedral, on a hilltop amid rolling green and brown Tuscan vineyards. Its main claim to fame, aside from the quasi-Byzantine church art he had studied there, was a peculiar annual horse race called the Palio, which he had heard about but never seen.

At first glance, the girl at the wheel of the old blue convertible made no strong impression on him: an oval face, dark enough so that he first took her for an Italian, dark hair, enormous sunglasses, a pink sweater over an open white shirt. Beside her sat a blond man covering a yawn with a long white hand.

“Hi! Byron Henry?”

“Yes.”

“Hop in the back. I’m Natalie Jastrow. This is Leslie Slote. He works in our embassy in Paris, and he’s visiting my uncle.”

Byron did not much impress the girl either. What Natalie Jastrow saw through the dark glasses was a slender lounger, obviously American, with red glints in his heavy brown hair; he was propped against the wall of the Hotel Continental in the sun, smoking a cigarette, his legs loosely crossed. The light gray jacket, dark slacks, and maroon tie were faintly dandyish. The forehead under the hair was wide, the long slanting jaws narrow, the face pallid. He looked like what he was - a collegiate drone, a rather handsome one. Natalie had brushed these off by the dozen in earlier years.

As they wound through narrow canyons of crooked ancient red-brown houses and drove out into the countryside, Byron idly asked Slote about his embassy work. The Foreign Service man told him he was posted in the political section and was studying Russian and Polish, hoping for an assignment to Moscow or Warsaw. Sitting in the car, Slote appeared very tall; later Byron saw that he himself was taller than Slote; the Foreign Service officer had a long trunk but medium-size legs. Slote’s thick blond hair grew to a peak over a high forehead and narrow pinkish face; the light blue eyes behind rimless glasses were alert and penetrating, and his thin lips were compressed as though with habitual resolve. All the time they drove, he held a large black pipe in his hand or in his mouth, not smoking it. It occurred to Byron that the Foreign Service might be a pleasant career, offering travel, adventure, and encounters with important people. But when Slote mentioned that he was a Rhodes Scholar, Byron decided not to pursue the topic.

Jastrow lived in a yellow stucco villa on a steep hillside, with a fine view of the cathedral and Siena’s red towers and tile roofs. It was a drive of about twenty minutes from town. Byron hurried after the girl and Slote through a terraced flowering garden full of black-stained plaster statues.

“Well, there you are!” The voice was high, authoritative, and impatient, with a faint foreign note in the pronouncing of the
r
’s.

Two sights struck Byron as they entered a long beamed living room: a painting of a red-robed Saint Francis with arms outstretched, on a background of gold, taking up a good part of one wall, and far down the long sitting room on a red silk couch, a bearded little man in a light gray suit, who looked at his watch, stood, and came toward them coughing.

“This is Byron Henry, Aaron,” the girl said.

Jastrow took Byron’s hand in two dry little paws and peered up at him with prominent wavering eyes. Jastrow’s head was large, his shoulders slight; he had aging freckled skin, light straight hair, and a heavy nose reddened by a cold. The neatly trimmed beard was all gray. “Columbia ‘38, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, well, come along.” He went off down the room, buttoning the flapping folds of his double-breasted suit. “Come here, Byron.” Plucking the stopper out of a heavy crystal decanter, he carefully poured amber wine into four glasses. “Come Leslie, Natalie. We don’t take wine during the day, Byron, but this is an occasion.” He held up his glass. “To Mr. Byron Henry, eminent hater of the Italian Renaissance.”

Byron laughed. “Is that what Dr. Milano wrote? I’ll drink to that.”

Jastrow took one sip, put down his glass, and looked at his watch. Seeing the professor wanted to get at his lunch, Byron tossed off the sherry like a shot of rye. Jastrow exclaimed with a delighted smile, “Ah! One, two, three. Good lad. Come along, Natalie. Leslie, take your glass to the table.”

It was a spare lunch: nothing but vegetables with white rice, then cheese and fruit. The service was on fine old china, maroon and gold. A small, gray-headed Italian woman passed the food. The tall dining room windows stood open to the garden, the view of Siena, and a flood of pale sunshine. Gusts of cool air came in as they ate.

When they first sat, the girl said, “What have you got against the Italian Renaissance, Byron?”

“That’s a long story.”

“Tell us,” said Jastrow in a classroom voice, laying a thumb across his smiling mouth.

Byron hesitated. Jastrow and the Rhodes Scholar made him uneasy. The girl disconcerted him more. Removing her glasses, she had disclosed big slanted dark eyes, gleaming with bold intelligence. She had a soft large mouth, painted a bit too orange, in a bony face. Natalie was regarding him with a satiric look, as though she had already concluded that he was a fool; and Byron was not fool enough to miss that.

“Maybe I’ve had too much of it,” he said. “I started out fascinated. I’m ending up snowed under and bored. I realize much of the art is brilliant, but there’s a lot of overrated garbage amid the works of genius. My main objection is that I can’t take the mixture of paganism and Christianity. I don’t believe David looked like Apollo, or Moses like Jupiter, or Mary like every Renaissance artist’s mistress with a borrowed baby on her lap. Maybe they couldn’t help showing Bible Jews as local Italians or pseudo-Greeks, but –” Byron dried up for a moment, seeing his listeners’ amused looks. “Look, I’m not saying any of this is important criticism. I guess it just shows I got into the wrong field. But what has any of it to do with Christianity? That’s what sticks in my craw. Supposing Christ came back to earth and visited the Uffizi, or Saint Peter’s? The Christ of your book, Dr. Jastrow, the poor idealistic Jewish preacher from the back hills? That’s the Lord I grew up with. My father’s a religious man; we had to read a chapter of the Bible every morning at home. Why, Christ wouldn’t even suspect the stuff related to himself and his teachings.” Natalie Jastrow was regarding him with an almost motherly smile. He said brusquely to her, “Okay. You asked me what I had against the Italian Renaissance. I’ve told you.”

“Well, it’s a point of view,” she said.

Eyes twinkling behind his glasses, Slote lit his pipe, and said between puffs, “Don’t fold up, Byron, there are others who have taken your position. A good name for it is Protestantism.”

“Byron’s main point is accurate.” Dr. Jastrow sounded kindly, dancing his little fingers together. “The Italian Renaissance was a great blossoming of art and ideas, Byron, that occurred when paganism and the Hebrew spirit - in its Christian expression - briefly fertilized instead of fighting each other. It was a hybrid growth, true, but some hybrids are stronger than either parent, you know. Witness the mule.”

“Yes, sir,” said Byron, “and mules are sterile.”

Amused surprise flashed on Natalie Jastrow’s face, and her enormous dark eyes flickered to Leslie Slote, and back to Byron.

“Well said. Just so.” Jastrow nodded in a pleased way. “The Renaissance indeed couldn’t reproduce itself, and it died off, while the pagan and Hebrew spirits went their separate immortal ways. But that mule’s bones are now one of mankind’s richest deposits of cultural achievement, Byron, whatever your momentary disgust from overexposure.”

Byron shrugged. Leslie Slote said, “Is your father a clergyman?”

“His father’s a naval officer,” said Jastrow.

“Really? What branch?”

Byron said, “Well, right now he’s in War Plans.”

“My goodness! War Plans?” Dr. Jastrow pretended a comic flutter. “I didn’t know that. Is it as ominous as it sounds?”

“Sir, every country draws up theoretical war plans in peacetime.”

“Does your father think a war is imminent?”

“I got my last letter from him in November. He said nothing about a war.”

The other three exchanged odd glances. Slote said, “Would he, in casual correspondence?”

“He might have asked me to come home. He didn’t.”

“Interesting,” said Dr. Jastrow, with a little complacent grin at Slote, rubbing his tiny hands.

“As a matter of fact, I think there’s going to be a war,” Byron said. This caused a silence of a second or two, and more glances.

Jastrow said, “Really? Why?”

“Well, I just toured Germany. You see nothing but uniforms, parades, drills, brass bands. Anywhere you drive, you end up passing army trucks full of troops, and railroad cars loaded with artillery and tanks. Trains sometimes a couple of miles long.”

“But, Byron, it was with just such displays that Hitler won Austria and the Sudetenland,” said Jastrow, “and he never fired a shot.”

Natalie said to Byron, “Leslie thinks my uncle should go home. We’ve had a running argument for three days.”

“I see.”

Jastrow was peeling a pear with elderly deliberate gestures, using an ivory-handled knife. “Yes, Byron, I’m being mulish.” The use of the word was accidental, for he grinned and added, “Being a hybrid of sorts myself, I guess. This is a comfortable house, it’s the only home I have now, and my work is going well. Moving would cost me half a year. If I tried to sell the house, I couldn’t find an Italian to offer me five cents on the dollar. They’ve been dealing for many centuries with foreigners who’ve had to cut and run. They’d skin me alive. I was aware of all this when I bought the villa. I expect to end my days here.”

“Not this fall at the hands of the Nazis, I trust,” Slote said.

“Oh, hell, Slote,” Natalie broke in, slicing a flat hand downward through the air. “Since when does the Foreign Service have such a distinguished record for foresight? Since Munich? Since Austria? Since the Rhineland? Weren’t you surprised every time?”

Byron listened with interest to this exchange. The others seemed to have forgotten he was at the table.

“Hitler has been making irrational moves with catastrophic possibilities,” Slote retorted. “Anybody can pull a gun in the street and shoot four people down before the cops come and stop him. Until now that’s been Hitler’s so-called foreign policy brilliance in a nutshell. The surprise of an outlaw running wild. That game’s played out. The others are aroused now. They’ll stop him in Poland.”

Jastrow ate a piece of pear, and began to talk in a rhythmic mellifluous way, something between meditating aloud and lecturing in a classroom. “Leslie, if Hitler were the Kaiser, or a man like the Charles the Twelfth, I admit I’d be worried. But he’s far more competent than you think. Fortunately the old ruling class is destroyed. They unleashed the World War with their dry-rotted incompetence, those preening, posturing, sleek royalties and politicians of 1914, those bemedalled womanizers and sodomites out of Proust. They never dreamed that the old manners, the old paperwork, the old protocol, were done for, and that industrialized warfare would shatter the old system like a boot kicked through a dollhouse. So they went to the trash heap, and new leadership came up out of the sewers, where realism runs and change often starts. The early Christians haunted the sewers and catacombs of Rome, you know,” Jastrow said to Byron Henry, clearly relishing a fresh audience.

“Yes, sir, I learned about that.”

“Of course you did. Well, Hitler’s a vagabond, Mussolini’s a vagabond, and Stalin’s a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize - the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.”

“Oh, for Pete’s
sake
, Aaron –”

“Just a moment, now! Lenin was all prudence and caution in foreign affairs, and
that
is my whole point. Glory, and honor, and all those tinselly illusions of the old system that led to wars, were to Lenin the merest eyewash. So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn’t get away with it. The outlaw running wild with a gun is the exact effect he wishes to create. I’m surprised that you’re taken in. He is really a very, very prudent man. If he can make it in Poland without war, he’ll do it. Otherwise he’ll not move. Not now. Perhaps in ten years, when he’s built Germany up enough. I shall be very content to live another ten years.”

Slote pulled at his moustache with lean nervous fingers. “You really lose me, Aaron. Can you be serious? Hitler a Leninist! That’s a coffeehouse paradox, and you know it. The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism. Don’t you know that? The 1934 purge was nothing but a showdown between the socialist element of the Nazi Party, and the army generals and rich conservatives. Hitler shot his old Party friends like partridges. That you rely on this man’s prudence for your safety, and for Natalie’s, strikes me as grotesque.”