Therese was silent. She averted her eyes, before the sight of that open nakedness, that passionate emotion and despair. They were foreign to her; they embarrassed her. But she was truly deeply touched. She tried to remember if she had ever heard of Henri Cot. Yes, she remembered something, faintly. A hard, fat, black-eyed little man, suspected of duplicity, fraud, financial genius and crafty manipulation. Really a despicable person.
She said: “I am sure, Madam Cot, that the Gestapo’s suspicions were without foundation.”
The woman sobbed again, shortly, painfully. “That is of no consequence now, Frau Doctor. They imprisoned him. They took him to Dachau. That was six months ago. I have tried to see him. It is no use. I know only that he is alive because a released prisoner came to me and told me so. What misery and sorrow I have endured! What agony, what hopelessness! And then the man came to me and said: ‘Madame Cot, your husband still lives, though they have injured him so severely that he is practically blind. For God’s sake, secure his release before it is too late.’”
Therese uttered a compassionate and embittered cry. “I can believe anything of them,” she said. “There is nothing that these monsters will not do.”
The woman wrung her hands; there was a faint ripping sound as she twisted her kerchief in her simple frenzy.
“That is not all, Frau Doctor. The Gestapo questioned me. Then—they confiscated my own accounts. They—they turned over the management of my salons to—to Germans. I am now penniless, Frau Doctor. I have nothing. To live, I have been compelled to sell all my jewels, save these. Henri’s famous library, and collection of Old Masters. My furniture, my house, even my clothing. I—I received a pittance for all these.…”
“Do you need money, shelter?” asked Therese, forgetting her aversion in her indignant sympathy.
Madam Cot wet her withered lips. She lifted her head. To Therese’s surprised admiration, there was pride and even offense in the woman’s jet eyes. She saw at once that to this woman acceptance of money was the supreme degradation. She would not hesitate to ask any help, no matter how arduous or dangerous, but money she would not ask. Therese could not understand such a perverted set of values.
“No, Frau, Doctor, I do not need money, yet. I wish only a little of what is mine. I wish only my Henri’s release. So that we can live in peace again, as good and faithful National Socialists. You see, we voted for Herr Hitler. We were devoted to him.” (It was evident that the unfortunate, and now servile creature, was hoping to gain favor in Therese’s eyes, and re-establish herself as respectable.) “Henri gave such huge sums of money. He lived only for the Party. He said: ‘Now is the time for the renaissance of the German spirit, the throwing-off of chains, the day of vengeance and national triumph.’ You see, my Henri was a fanatical Nazi. I was concerned the most with my business. That was my sole interest. But Henri, though born in France, was a passionate German.”
Therese’s aversion and dislike had returned with redoubled force. She said coldly: “How extraordinary for you, who are French!”
To her surprise, the woman colored. Her eyes dropped. She fumbled in her lap. It was evident that she was overpoweringly embarrassed. She did not look at Therese as she stammered thickly:
“You can see how it is, Frau Doctor. We are good Germans, now. We are National Socialists. We have given large sums. When our friends criticized, we remonstrated with them. You Germans are often so tender-hearted. Many of our friends were disgusted and outraged at the treatment of those horrible Jews. Those ghetto Jews! How I loathe them! I said: ‘They are not true Germans, these Jews. They deserve their punishment. They have ruined Germany.’”
“What gave you that amazing idea, Madam Cot?” asked Therese, with increasing coldness and dislike. “Besides, I take exception, personally, to your remarks. My husband’s adopted brother was a Jew, and a truly noble man. I will not have him insulted in my house.” She made a movement as though to rise and dismiss the woman.
The woman was silent. The color was hard and swollen in her face. She regarded Therese with a pathetic and animal despair; her lips shook. She bit the lower lip. And then tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Forgive me, Frau Doctor,” she said, humbly. “I was not denouncing the real German Jews, the loyal German Jews. It is just the—the outlanders, the Jews who would not be Germans—that I have disliked so intensely. The Jews who remained individualistic, who held themselves aloof from Christianity, who would not be absorbed, who criticized and stood apart, and would not remain silent even if they could not agree.…”
There was a sudden sharp long silence in the room. Therese stared deeply into those swimming and fainting eyes, those agonized and hopeless eyes. Her own face showed her troubled understanding and quick compassion.
“I see,” she said gently, at last. “You are Jewish, you and your husband, Madam Cot?”
The color deepened still more in the woman’s quivering face, as though she were overcome with some intolerable shame. She clenched her hands together with a kind of savage fierceness. “We—we were born—half-Jews, Frau Doctor. But we were truly never one in heart with the obscenity of those inabsorbable Jews. We came at an early age to Germany. We became Germans. We have always been Germans! We love Germany, and all that is Germany. We love our Fuehrer. We are Christians, German Lutheran Christians. Pious devoted Christians. We are Jews no longer. We probably never were really Jews. That—that is what is so dreadful to us.” She sobbed aloud. “And now, the house where I live is daubed with yellow! When I go upon the street, the people spit at me. They call me ‘Jew!’ My former friends, my patrons, will not see me. They avoid me. They pass me on the street without looking at me.” She beat her palms together in an enraged frenzy and grief. “But I am no Jew! I repudiate the Jews! I am a German Christian! I hate Jews! I loathe them, and would not care if they all died!”
The despicable creature! thought Therese, her compassion leaving her. Her eyes sparkled with her disgust. She looked at the cross on the woman’s breast. It was large, obvious. So this horrible woman had tried to conceal herself behind that gaudy bauble, shouting her repudiations! It was not to be borne with quietness. She could not keep the loathing from her voice when she said:
“Is that the reason you wear that cross constantly, Madam Cot? To alleviate suspicions that you are a Jew? To convince potential enemies that you are not a Jew?”
“No, no,” stuttered the woman. But Therese knew it was true. Then all at once she was compassionate again, in spite of her disgust. What dreadful creatures we Gentiles are! she thought, to visit such degradation on another human being! This woman’s shame is our shame. We are guilty. This woman has tried to destroy her soul, but she did it at our insistence. To placate us, to save herself from our monstrous cruelty and abominable savagery, she wore our symbol. She does not know that we have made that symbol a badge of infamy, destruction and hatred, ignorance and death.
“Forgive us!” she cried aloud, involuntarily, her voice a cry. “Forgive us for what we have done to you!”
The woman gaped at Therese’s pale and working face.
“You have done nothing to me,” she whispered. “You were always kind to me, Frau Doctor.”
Therese could not restrain herself. She sprang to her feet. She began to walk up and down the room. But wherever she looked, she could not shut out the vision of that derisively winking cross. The cross of the heroic and gentle Jew, who had loved all men, had ached and suffered for all men, who had died on a cross of wood and torment, hoping only that he had lifted other sufferers from darkness and death! And now the reasoning and the compassionate, the gentle and the good, must repudiate that cross, denounce it, turn aside from it, because of the foul thing the wicked had made of it! It was too awful.
She stopped abruptly before Madame Cot. “Tell me, what can I do for you?” she asked, trying to control her shaking voice.
The woman, all her defenses gone, seized a fold of Therese’s dress, and clutched it with both hands, as
though she were drowning.
“Frau Doctor! You can help me. When your father died, another took his place in his church. Bishop Franz Althaus. You know him. I—I have learned that he was your godfather, and your father’s closest friend. We—we are members of his congregation.”
Therese was silent. She had not seen her godfather for over a year. She despised and detested him, though he had always been affectionate and solicitous of her. His wife was childless; he had regarded Therese as his own daughter. But she had avoided him more and more as the years passed, hating to accept his generous gifts on her birthdays and at Christmas. She had known all the time what he was, a bellicose and narrow man, greedy, pious, avaricious, unctuous, brutal and cowardly, without a truly magnificent emotion or a single human goodness. She had heard that he was highly regarded by the Nazis. He had been very fervent in his sermons about Adolf Hitler. He had exhorted his people to bow down before this foul anti-Christ, this madman, saying that God had sent him to save Germany. She had often read his sermons, widely and conspicuously published in the newspapers. But lately she could not read them. They were like a stench to her nostrils. This cross-decorated panderer to the destroyer of Christianity! This betrayer of human souls to their seducer and befouler! She had not thought even he could be so base, so contemptible.
She became aware, through the stress of her seething emotions, that Madam Cot had been speaking.
“… and so, remembering how gracious he had always been to us, and how we were his most generous parishioners, giving large sums, and devoting ourselves diligently to the work of the Church, participating in all its activities, I went to him, asking for help for my Henri. It was very terrible. He listened coldly. Then he said he could do nothing, would do nothing, for a disloyal man like Henri. A man who had helped Jews. Then he said: ‘But that is understandable. You are Jews. One can never trust Jews.’ It was in vain that I expostulated that we were not Jews, but Christians. He only glared at me.” The woman swallowed painfully. Torment and bewilderment dimmed her eyes. “That is not all. When I went to church for consolation, and hope in my sorrow, I found that my pew had been taken from me. I found that I must sit in a segregated corner, in the rear, far to one side, as though I carried pollution with me. And—and,” her voice dropped to a whisper. “I—I found others there. A few—like me. I had not known these were Jews, too. They sat there, shivering and terrified. And our friends, with whom we had worked, whom we had visited, and whom we had entertained, either looked at us with contempt, as we huddled there, or ignored us as though we were beasts. As though we were not good Christians!”
She swallowed again, convulsively. “There were half-Jews there, quarter-Jews. One could not, with sense, consider them anything else but devoted Christians, much more zealous and pious than those who called themselves ‘Aryans.’ Why, some of them were even the most violent anti-Semites!”
Therese said: “A year ago, a month ago, I should have denounced such degradation. Now I know who are the real guilty.”
But Madam Cot did no understand. She went on, whimpering: “Some of them were accompanied, in that segregated corner, by their ‘Aryan’ husbands and wives. It was not necessary that these Aryans sit there. But they did, boldly and palely, staring at our Bishop with such hatred and scorn! It was not Christian, Frau Doctor, to stare like that. I was the first to decry it. I said to one of these ‘Aryan’ wives: ‘Why do you sit here, if you hate our good Bishop so?’ And she looked at me with such eyes! ‘To denounce him, to prevent him from forgetting! To avenge all of us!’ And the other Aryans nodded. They were not afraid. It was only the Jews who were afraid. They kept their heads down, weeping.”
Therese smiled strangely and whitely. “Then, there is still integrity and honor, even among us! There is still hope for us!”
The woman sobbed, not comprehending. “I do not think there is any real hope for us, Frau Doctor. But still, I have come to you. I thought perhaps you might intercede for Henri and myself, with your godfather. I thought you might persuade him to speak for Henri, to the Gestapo. He has such influence. They would release Henri at his word, in his custody. I thought perhaps you might speak to him, assuring him of our Christianity, our devotion to the National Socialist Party, our piety and zeal for the Church and for Germany. We are not Jews. We are German Christians.”
Therese sat down. She regarded Madam Cot with a mingling of contempt, pity, and bitterness.
“You are really a despicable person,” she said, in a low clear voice. “But I do not denounce you too much. We have made you so. I will go to my godfather, not just because of your private business, but because of ourselves.” She added, gazing hard into the other’s bewildered and shifting eyes: “I should not go, even now, however, if I were not assured in my heart that your husband has been helping Jews.” She stood up, “Remain here. I shall go at once. Perhaps I shall have good news for you when I return.”
“God bless you, Frau Doctor! I know you have a good Christian heart!”
Therese’s pale mouth opened on a sigh of disgust. But she said nothing.
22
On the way to the Bishop’s residence, Therese thought:
“There is no end to the baseness of human beings. There is no end to their horribleness, their fiendishness, their shamefulness and evil. What few feeble stirrings of conscience they possess are easily quieted by expediency, by slyness, by avarice and complete atavistic wickedness. Men delight in evil and darkness. They delight in cruelty and malice and brutality. They love to gloat over another’s suffering. If there is a God, how can He endure us? From what pit of horror have we arisen? From what foul cesspool have we crawled?”
She felt as though she were suffocating. She drew in deep gasping breaths. She gazed through the windows of the car, blindly. It was early autumn. The sky was gray and overcast; the air was ashen. The houses marched gloomily side by side, like forbidding walls. A few dark leaves drifted from the trees, like cinders. The car paused for a clearing of traffic near a concert hall. Therese could faintly hear the doleful muttering of drums, the dolorous wail of flute and trumpet. Beethoven, mourning for a world that hated him, and for which he had only sorrow and compassion. It was the mourning of all the heroes, of all the martyrs, of the Christs and the angels, of God Himself. The vast mourning of an outraged Universe for the obscenity and the fury of men.
Food and a victim. That is all that men required. Food for their belly; a victim for their lust. Hitler knew this. That is why he was successful. This man was no man. He was an arch-fiend who understood mankind. He gave men food; he gave them a victim. That is why they were no slaves following him blindly, but satisfied and exultant monsters who loved him for what he had done for them. He had, released their lusts. That was the secret of his growing power. The Christs told them they had souls. But they had no desire for souls. That is why they hated the Christs.
But there were a few. Surely, there were a few! The Traubs and the Muehlers. Only a handful of men. Would they save the city from the wrath of God? “Ten righteous men” would save the city. Were there ten to be found?
But the “ten righteous men” had deserted Germany. They had fled from her travail, from the march of the legions of hell. Were they not, as Doctor Traub said, more guilty than the monsters themselves?
Is there no hope for Germany? she asked herself with despair. Does the world not know what is happening here? Surely it must know. England, France, America—they must all know. Why did they turn their eyes aside? Did they not know, in their stubborn blindness, or their craft, or their greed, or their selfishness, or their lust, that in Germany was their own abattoir, their own Gethsemane? Did they not know that all mankind was climbing the Hill of Calvary, today in Germany? Surely they must know. But they were full of evil and malignancy, also. They refused to see that when one man was martyred all men were martyred. When a single grave was dug for an innocent, the grave was dug for all men. God would not be mocked. He was asking all men everywhere: “Where is t
hy brother?” And all men, in all the world, were replying with an, ancient and terrible cynicism: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
For this, the mark of Cain was set on the brows of every man. The mark of Cain was set there for a thousand generations, not only for today. It would be washed away only by the blood and the agony of multitudes. No, God would not be mocked. The day of doom had arrived. A day of doom that would last a thousand years. There would be no peace for mankind. It had betrayed itself; it had betrayed God. The rumblings of vengeance could already be heard. God would not be mocked. The heavens were already red with His wrath.
The world said, looking on the madness and the violence and darkness of Germany: “It is not my business.” But one of these days it would know it was its business, and its children would be heaped in the gutters, its blood would flow through countless streets, its dying hands would be lifted to fiery avenging heavens. And there would be no reply. England—France—America. They would pay for their smirking and cynical silence. They would pay, until every last innocent drop of blood was avenged, and every child comforted. They would pay until every last grave was at peace. This was justice. This was the law of Almighty God.
It did not matter what lofty sophistries men used to excuse their delinquencies. They could speak of “natural if violent phenomena of social change,” and “convulsions in governmental systems which must inevitably reach a certain subsiding mean,” and all the other infamous smooth falsehoods. The frightful fact remained, inexorable and simple, that one man’s agony was every man’s guilt. A guilt he must atone for by his own agony.
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