“First,” he said gently, “you must dine with us.”
Helene, twittering, wiping her hands furtively with her palms, entered the room. She was short and stout, like her husband, with graying untidy hair, a homely smiling face, and beautiful kind eyes. A hausfrau, big-bosomed and squat-limbed and shapeless of figure. Like her husband’s, her eyes twinkled behind glasses.
“Therese!” she exclaimed. She had seen everything, but pretended not to. “It is so good of you to come! You must pardon me; I have been making Felix’s favorite cake. The one with raisins and nuts, that you liked so much when you were a little girl.” She bent and kissed Therese’s cold moist forehead; she pressed her hand. “Now you are here, you must stay with us.”
“Yes,” said Therese, but her voice was thick. It is not Helene who is stupid, but I, she thought. She clung to the old woman’s hand as though she were drowning.
Helene put her worn fingers on Therese’s head, with the gentle touch of a mother. She had no children of her own. She said: “But it will be a little while. Go with Felix into the garden. The last roses have come out. Soon there shall be no more.”
“No more,” echoed Therese dumbly. No more time, no more roses, no more peace. Her vision dimmed. She felt herself walking beside the old doctor through the wide windows that opened on the garden. Her hand lay on his arm; he kept his warm palm over her cold fingers. They stopped before the profuse rosebushes, whose buds were like splashes of blood among the green leaves. A bird flew over their heads with a rush of wings. A squirrel paused in the tall tangled grass and gazed at them with bright and vivid curiosity. The trees bent, their crowns of gold glittering and breaking. The garden was surrounded by an old red-brick wall, warm in the sun, and dreaming. Bees shrilled over clumps of old-fashioned flowers. It was so quiet here. Therese remembered the old Grimm fairy tales of enchanted gardens, lost in time, lost in dreams, lost in space and reality. This was such a garden. The gate had closed behind her; the world had ceased to exist. The ache that suffused her was the ache of old remembered pain, lessening every moment.
Doctor Traub picked a perfect rosebud, and she tucked it in her thin coat. She bent her head and inhaled the perfume. She was like a sufferer eagerly inhaling the fumes of ether, and wishing to escape torment. They sat down under a tree and looked before them, their eyes misty with enchantment and peace. The ancient house stood at a distance, its panes shining in the sun, a plume of smoke curling over its dim gray roof, its walls stained with green lichen.
Therese sighed. Doctor Traub waited. Because of his paunch he had to sit upright, his short square hands planted on his fat knees. The sun lay on his bare large head. Dignity, strength and solidity emanated from him.
“Is it better with Karl?” he asked gently.
“No,” she answered in a dull voice. “It is much worse. I have not seen him for four days. I only hear him, pacing back and forth, and sometimes muttering.” Suddenly, frenzy was upon her again.
“I must tell you what I have done! I have gone to the American Consul. I have entered our names on the quota. We must leave Germany.” She put her hands to her head. “I must get Karl away from here!”
“And you think that will do any good?”
“Why not?” she cried a little wildly. “Surely, in America, or even Paris, or London, or perhaps Vienna, or Switzerland—! Oh, I have thought it over! I cannot endure it any longer. He will die here; he will go completely mad. And I am afraid that I shall go mad, too! There is something in Germany now, like a drug, and it is in my own food. I cannot live here any longer!”
He listened with intense gravity. He watched her very closely. Finally he stood up and walked away slowly. He bent over a rosebush and pinched off a dead leaf. He looked up at the trees and whistled softly to the birds. He put his arms behind his back, and stood so, looking up, the sun on his tired sad old face. Then, after a long time, he came back to Therese. He sat down again. He gazed at her distraught face. He began to speak slowly and quietly:
“There are some who have had to leave Germany, to save their lives. I do not blame them. There are others who have not had to leave Germany; they have deserted her, in the time of her greatest need. I blame them; I condemn them. They are like physicians who leave their patients on their deathbeds. They have claimed that they can no longer breathe the air of Germany, that they can no longer exist within her walls. They have said stupid things about their souls, and their art, and their love of freedom, and their disgust with the sickness of Germany. Despite their souls, they are stupid, and wicked, and fools. They are cowards, and weaklings, and traitors. They have had no love for the Fatherland in their pusillanimous souls. They have taken from Germany all that they could seize; they have robbed her. They have left her in the hands of her enemies. The ship is sinking; the rats are leaving. The captain and his officers have been the first to desert.”
Therese uttered a thin and bitter sound. “Should they have stayed, and eventually been tortured and killed?”
He nodded his head with profound gravity. “Yes, even for that. What do individuals matter, if they have done their work? There is a greater thing than man: men. A man must lose his soul if he is to save others. He must forget his own life, his own safety, his own comfort. These who have deserted Germany have not forgotten. They are greedy little people whose skins are more valuable to them than the agonies of those they have left behind in the prison. Once it was beautiful if a man sacrificed all he was and all he had, for an ideal, for his country, for his people. Now it is no longer beautiful; it is silly. It is much better to run away, where one can eat and excrete in safety; it is as though a worm considered himself of much more importance than the earth.”
Therese said nothing; she fixed her haggard eyes hopelessly on the ground. But there was about her a weary impatience and pain.
The grave rough voice went on, becoming more melancholy. “That is what is wrong with the world today, and wrong with Germany. ‘The narrowing lust’ for comfort and safety and security. Heroism causes a burst of castrated laughter. Self-sacrifice is absurd. Love and strength and manhood excite the jeers of the little men. Austerity and discipline, help for a neighbor, common suffering and honor: these are the forgotten verities. If we do not remember them in time we are hopelessly lost, and the world lost with us.”
He looked at Therese with sad intensity.
“You say you will run away with Karl. Where will you run? To Paris? To London? To Vienna? To America? You will find a version of the same madness there which is suffocating Germany. The same plague is there, the same pestilence of the mind. You cannot escape it. It is creeping like a tide, or carried on the wind, like bacteria. The world is going mad; it is driving itself mad. Do not think you can escape the pursuit of madness.”
He sighed deeply. His head dropped on his chest. He went on mournfully: “There are some who say that men have forgotten God. Perhaps it is true. For God is all sanity and goodness, all faith and courage and hope. Now it is only the individual, with his own bowels and his possessions, who is valuable. Man has become entranced with himself. He is tired; he is exhausted, for there is no sustenance in self, my dear Therese. An immense weariness and heaviness of spirit has the world by the throat, throttling its will, forcing it to turn away its eyes in a slothful will-to-die. The rest of the world, no less than Germany, is sick with weltschmerz.”
He flung out his short fat arms with a tragic gesture.
“There are some who know this, realize this. Their duty is before them, even unto the death. What can be said of these, when they run away? What answer can they make to their consciences, to God? ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Ah, yes, a thousand times! a man is his brother’s keeper.”
Therese listened; her pale face was intent; her lips opened. Grief filled her eyes.
“But what can I do?”
“You can save Karl. Germany needs him. You must save Karl for Germany.”
She laughed wretchedly. “But how?”
&nb
sp; “I do not know, my child. That you must find out for yourself. I have told you before. You say you do not know where to start. Start with yourself. How can you give hope to others if you have no hope in your own heart? ‘Seek and ye shall find’ is still true today as if was two thousand years ago.”
He stood up. “And now, Helene calls us. We must not keep her waiting.”
They walked towards the house together. The garden was no longer enchanted. It, too, was exhausted, and filled with sorrow. The sun darkened behind a cloud. There she said aloud, suddenly: “If there were only a God!” And her voice was the despairing voice of a child.
Doctor Traub smiled faintly. “Perhaps there is! O, perhaps there is! But always we must act as though there were.”
He added: “But this I know: that there is time no longer for man for himself, for man for his gains and his own lusts. There is something abroad in the world—”
10
Maria Erlich was surprised when her sister-in-law was announced in the afternoon of a gray summer day. The cool and conventional Therese was not given to casual visits, without a previous announcement. Contained, composed and poised, she always made a point of being expected and being received without the fluster an unexpected visitor almost always occasions.
Maria, though she hardly confessed it to herself, stood in some awe of Therese. She felt at a disadvantage with this daughter of good family and position. Having no soldiers, politicians or clergyman in her own family, she professed to despise them, as became the daughter of a solid burgher born to suspicion of those who ruled. Nevertheless, as is the way with all burghers, she secretly reverenced the aristocracy, for all her contemptuous laughter.
Therese never put on graces or airs, but there was something in her manner which implied that she scorned them, these marks of the vulgar and the insecure and the ambitious. Nevertheless, she chronically irritated Maria, who considered that Therese’s simple manners and poise were the greatest snobbery. Maria believed that those who were superior were well aware of it, and affected simplicity. This was all hypocrisy, of course, and very annoying.
She usually received Therese with a jocose smile and gestures, and a knowing look, all serving to hide her uneasiness and sense of inferiority. She had a habit of eyeing Therese with sidelong looks and an air of knowing something to Therese’s disadvantage. It was these looks and this air which so irritated Karl, but Therese never seemed to notice, which further annoyed her sister-in-law.
Today, however, the jocund smile, the knowing expression, were absent. Maria’s pudgy and usually high-colored face was preoccupied and disturbed. Nor did she bluster at the servant when she ordered coffee and small cakes for her guest. Her flabby flesh seemed flabbier than ever; little beads of moisture were collected above her short pouting upper lip, and about her temples.
The dampness had made Therese’s fair hair curl and twine over her forehead and against her cheeks. But her gray eyes were ringed in violet, and her face was haggard and strained. Nevertheless, her manner was, as usual, polite and coolly friendly, and composed. She remarked on the inclement weather, and glanced at her damp shoes. Maria vigorously stirred the fire, and the huge ugly room roared with its infuriated sound, and was filled with red glinting shadows.
“The coldness is unusual for this season,” said Maria.
Her dislike for Therese, and her uneasiness, increased. She said: “How is Karl?”
Therese gazed at the fire, and for a moment Maria thought she had not heard the question. Then she replied quietly: “I believe he is improving. He is not so excited. He has slept the last few nights, and he accepted an invitation to dinner for next Friday at the home of General Siegfried Heyliger. The Herr General is my second cousin, you know.”
Maria fumed with envy. The General and his wife had been scrupulously cordial when she had met them at Therese’s home, but they had not extended any invitations. She laughed shortly.
“What a bore that old man is! Please forgive me, Therese, but you do know the dullest people!”
Therese smiled slightly, without offense, and refused to be annoyed. She did not reply. After a few moments, during which Maria’s face reddened, she asked: “And how are Kurt’s eyes? And his headache?”
She was not interested, and believed that Maria would merely shrug and answer that all was well with Kurt. She was surprised to see that Maria’s expression changed to one of great disturbance.
“I do not believe it is his eyes after all. His headaches continue. As for myself, I think he is only neurotic and upset about Karl. He speaks of him constantly.”
Therese, paling a little, leaned forward the better to see Maria in the dim shifting light. “He is not better? His headaches are worse?”
In a loud angry voice, Maria said: “Much worse. He broods night and day. When the telephone rings he trembles. It is really too bad about Karl. He is punishing his brother too much. After all, Kurt only did his duty.”
She stared furiously at Therese’s white drawn face with the curiously brilliant eyes.
“Oh, I know that you condemn Kurt, too, Therese, in spite of your aristocratic silence! And yet you had no particular love for Eric and Gerda. You see I know you quite well, in spite of your cool pretty manners. You were jealous of Karl’s affection for his sister, and annoyed because he spent so much time with that—Eric. I saw it all!”
Therese’s pale lips twitched. She gazed at Maria with a shocked look. Was I, then, so transparent, so small, so mean? she asked herself. But no, surely, I loved poor little Gerda. Ah, poor little Gerda! And Eric, whom she had accepted and whom she had always treated with affection and courtesy. But had there not been times when she had felt very tolerant and progressive because of this very affection and courtesy? Had she not considered herself very amiable, for Karl’s sake?
“He is right: I must begin with myself,” she said in a trembling voice.
Maria stared. “Who is right?” she demanded.
But Therese did not answer. She was standing again in the enchanted garden with old Doctor Traub, and her heart was sick with self-disgust and bitter humiliation. I, no less than all the others, am guilty of the madness of Germany, she thought. Of the madness of all the world. She pressed her hands convulsively together, and was conscious of hideous coldness running over all her body. Her soul quivered as though stricken by lightning, and fainted with sorrow.
Maria fumed again, this time with impatience.
“You are always so cryptic, Therese. I suppose that is because you consider yourself an intellectual. But intellectuals are in bad repute these days in Germany. So futile and pallid, so impotent and whining.”
She expected that at last her insults would arouse Therese to affront. But Therese looked at her with dazed eyes.
You are quite right, Maria. Only I know how right you are.”
Maria’s mouth opened with astonishment.
Therese went on in a faint muffled tone: “I do not condemn Kurt too much. You see, Maria, Karl and I are also guilty. Karl because he refused to see and refused to act. I because I was so smug and so tolerant.”
Maria’s astonishment grew. She felt superior to this broken woman with the tears thick in her gray sunken eyes. And because of this new and exhilarating superiority her malice subsided, and she experienced a throb of kindliness.
“I am glad you are so sensible, Therese. Tolerance is a disease. We Germans have been too tolerant of the Jews, our enemies. I was always surprised at your magnanimity towards Eric Reinhardt. I never wanted him in our house, but Kurt insisted. I could not understand Kurt, who disliked Eric so much. Now we are all awakened; the Jews must die, or be driven from Germany. I prefer they die. Wherever they are they will always be a source of infection for the world.”
Therese said, in a dim, slightly wild voice: “I did not know why I came here today, but now I know!”
Again Maria stared, frowning. “I am glad if I have helped you,” she muttered sullenly. “In any event, I am pleased that
you do not condemn Kurt. If only Karl were so sensible.” She sighed with exasperation. “There is something indecent in Kurt’s love for his brother, something obsessed. I always thought so. Karl infuriated him frequently, and they never understood each other. But still there was that obscene affection in Kurt. Such a foolish look would appear on his face when Karl entered a room, and he would listen to everything Karl said with the passionate preoccupation of a lover. I had hoped, this time, that Karl’s ridiculous rage against Kurt because of Eric Reinhardt would disillusion him, and make him aware of the degradation of Karl’s unspeakable admiration and attachment to that—Jew. But it was too much to hope.”
She went on gloomily: “And now, when there is so much change and joy in Germany, and so much pain in Kurt, he speaks of nothing but his brother, and listens for him, and calls a dozen times a day to see if there is any message.”
Therese said again in that faint muffled tone: “Ah, my God, poor Kurt! Poor Karl!”
Maria was deeply touched. “It is so kind of you to say that, Therese. If you could only bring them together again.”
Her fat peasant face was suddenly twisted and grotesque with suffering and love. And Therese, seeing this, felt her heart open with grief and understanding.
She had seen herself revealed; she had instinctively sought something here, and she had found it. Now she could go. She must be alone with herself, to bind up her wounds and endure her anguish in privacy.
Just then her two nephews entered the room. Vaguely she became aware that they were in uniforms of some kind, and on their sleeves were fastened swastikas. She liked neither of them, though Wilhelm, with his young thin grave face and cropped light hair, resembled Karl, and Alfred, bulky, vigorous and extrovert, like his mother, was always affectionate with her, and openly admired her.
Wilhelm clicked his heels and bowed stiffly over her hand, with a murmured word. But Alfred kissed her heartily and asked after her health. She smiled at him as she had not smiled at Wilhelm. He was so wholesome, with his round hard red cheeks, his knowing eyes like his mother’s, but merrier and gallant, his broad young shoulders, and the smell of clean virile young manhood about him. She never smelt this virility in Wilhelm, for all his steady intelligent eyes and thin erect body. Often she had wondered how she had come to admire and love an intellectual like Karl, for like all her class she distrusted fine-drawn and too unhuman intellectualism. She glanced up suddenly to see that Wilhelm was regarding her fixedly and a little sternly. Then her glance sharpened; there was something in his aspect which sinkingly reminded her of Karl’s present look and distraction.
Time No Longer Page 11
