Beneath the Dover Sky

by Murray Pura

  “You see the police are here, Albrecht. The Gestapo,” Mueller warned in a low voice nodding slightly toward the back row of seats. “Be careful what you say, professor, or you will find yourself arrested and taken somewhere far away. We’ve already lost several members of our teaching staff. Play the Nazi game, and you will weather the storm. If you remain ramrod straight and self-righteous, the winds of change will surely break you. I shall meet you for supper. Heil, Hitler.”

  “Jewish professors, Herr Doktor? Jewish colleagues? Are they the ones the Nazis have purged from among you?”

  “Heil, Hitler.”

  “Friends like Mandelbaum in chemistry and Goldstein in physics? And you let them? You did nothing?”

  “I say again, ‘Heil, Hitler.’ ”

  Albrecht could not resist. “Hail, Mary.”

  Mueller stared at him in shock.

  Albrecht continued. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

  Mueller snapped his head away. “We will skip the formal meal with the faculty. You can see yourself out after your last lecture this evening. Don’t expect any visits from the other professors. Associating with you puts us all at risk.” He turned and walked quickly from the room.

  A spirit rose in Albrecht he refused to quell. He greeted the students as he arranged his notes at the podium by saying, “You know, I am going to change my lecture altogether. I have a sudden inspiration to forgo my scheduled talk on the historical Jesus and to examine the “Mary Prayer,” which I’m sure you are all well acquainted with. ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.’ ”

  He spoke for an hour, took the numerous questions that came his way, bowed when the students applauded, and remained at the podium for the next lecture as the first group of students left and a new class made their way in. He looked toward the back and noticed the police hadn’t moved. Both were still in their seats. The dark-haired one was scribbling rapidly in a black notebook.

  His second lecture was on Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and Albrecht emphasized the chapter on love. The third lecture Albrecht had entitled “The True Cross,” and it centered on the sacrifice of Jesus at Calvary. At the end of the lecture, he compared the broken cross of the swastika with the unbroken cross of Christ. By the time he gave his final talk, it was dark. He lectured on one line from the gospel of John: “He then having received the sop went out immediately. And it was night.”

  The police left when the last few students finished speaking with Albrecht. They didn’t look his way or say a word.

  The dining hall was deserted and there wasn’t much left to purchase when Albrecht arrived, but he was able to get a hot bowl of cabbage soup, a large portion of rye bread, and a wedge of hard cheese, along with a cup of coffee. Shouts and singing filtered into the hall from outside, and he asked a waiter what was happening.

  “A cultural event, sir,” the waiter responded. “You would be most welcome to join in, I’m sure.”

  Albrecht finished his meal and went out to the plaza. The first thing he saw was a bonfire in the middle of the large, open space. It was surrounded by thousands of students and stormtroopers singing Nazi marching songs. He spotted Mueller tugging a cartload of books from the direction of the library, laughing with two Gestapo who were helping him—the same men who had taken notes at the lectures. Albrecht thought they were going to set up a display in the plaza. To his horror, once the men reached the bonfire, students grabbed the books and hurled them into the flames. Mueller and the police officers helped them.

  “You heard Reich Minister Goebbels!” Mueller shouted. “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state!”

  The students cheered and then began to chant. Albrecht saw a large microphone from a radio station being adjusted so listeners at home could hear the chant clearly. Trucks pulled up with cargoes of books that the students and professors took up by the armload and threw into the heart of the fire.

  “Destroy the un-German spirit!”

  “Cleanse the nation! Cleanse the universities! Cleanse our blood!”

  Singing erupted again.

  We will continue to march,

  Even if everything shatters;

  Because today Germany hears us,

  And tomorrow, the whole World.

  And the elders may chide,

  So just let them scream and cry,

  And if the World decides to fight us,

  We will still be the victors.

  They don’t want to understand this song,

  They think of slavery and war.

  Meanwhile our acres ripen,

  Flag of freedom, fly!

  We will continue to march,

  Even if everything shatters;

  Freedom arose in Germany,

  And tomorrow the world belongs to it.

  No sooner had one song finished before professors and students and stormtroopers began to thunder out another.

  Germany awake from your nightmare!

  Give Jews no place in your Empire!

  We will fight for your resurgence!

  Aryan blood shall never perish!

  All these hypocrites we throw them out!

  Judea leave our German house!

  If the native soil is clean and pure

  We united and happy will be!

  To the swastika, devoted are we!

  Hail our Leader, Hail Hitler to thee!

  Students rushed by Albrecht loaded down with books. He grabbed one of them and shouted, “What are you doing? Think of what is happening here! This is a great university! Do not tear it down in one night!” Volumes spilled from the youth’s arms. Albrecht saw the names Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and Victor Hugo on the spines.

  The youth cursed and punched Albrecht in the face so hard he staggered backwards, clutching his briefcase. Then the student knelt, scooped up the books, and ran towards the fire.

  “I will deal with this!” seethed Albrecht. He headed towards the blaze. “Before God, I will stop this!”

  A young woman dressed completely in black seized his hand. “Do not fight them, Professor Hartmann. They are wild enough to throw you into the flames along with the books.”

  He tried to shake his hand free, but she held it with a grip like iron.

  “What are you doing?” Albrecht raged. “Let go of me! I do not fear them!”

  “You should fear them. They are many, and you are but one.”

  He looked at her gray eyes, blonde hair, and tense face. “I can make them listen.”

  “No, you can’t. Not unless you are Goebbels or Himmler or Adolph Hitler himself. You have family, don’t you? A wife and children? Do you want them all to be picked up by the Gestapo? They have already done it to other teachers here in Berlin—and not all of them were Jews.”

  She released his hand. He could still feel the pressure from her strong fingers.

  “Write us another book instead,” she told him. “You will have to publish and distribute it in secret, but it will eventually find its way into all corners of Germany. People will read it. Fight the Nazis that way…and the professors who have forgotten what they represent.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Stefanie Brecht. Write the book for me, if for no one else.”

  She vanished into the dark. He couldn’t tell which way she’d gone. He turned back to the fire. His mind much calmer, he walked towards the sheets of flame. Thousands were singing the Nazi songs now. The plaza was full.

  “Our Father which art in heaven,” he prayed under his breath. The winds of the fire sent pages whirling into the night, along with ashes and sparks. One after another flew over Albrecht’s head or landed at his feet.
He stopped and picked up several. He recognized names of American writers such as John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, along with British writers Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, and H.G. Wells. There were German writers too—Erich Maria Remarque and his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Bertolt Brecht and his Threepenny Opera, and the Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler’s Understanding Human Nature. A page from Tolstoy’s War and Peace lay across his shoe.

  The man next to Albrecht bent down for a sheet curled from the heat, muttering that he had his hands on a piece of Franz Kafka rubbish. Albrecht made a sudden decision to get away from the plaza. He kept his head down as he passed some SS officers whose eyes glittered like fire stones. A number of charred papers were scattered over a hedge, speared by the sharp points of the pruned branches. He plucked several free that were stuck together and glanced at them as he made his way through the crowds and off the campus.

  “Heinrich Heine’s play Almansor,” he said out loud. Reading over the pages one after another in the streaks and flares of light, he dropped each on the pavement once he was finished. Near the bottom of the last page his eyes caught a phrase he went over twice. Three SS men hurried past him towards the bonfire, coming from the direction of a bookstore that had all its windows shattered. The men’s arms were crammed with books. Albrecht’s quick glimpse revealed that several of the volumes were titled Mein Geist. Albrecht saw a photograph of his face on the back cover of one and quickly looked away. He placed the charred sheet from Heine’s 1821 play into his coat pocket. The words he’d noticed ran through his mind like a line of fire as he made his way through traffic and across roadways, getting further and further from the red-and-black flames:

  “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”

  He wanted to remember to tell Catherine about this so he mentally translated the words, “That was only the beginning. Where they burn books, in the end they will burn people.”

  22

  July, 1933

  The English Channel, near the Port of Dover

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.

  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

  Though much is taken, much abides; and though

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  “Capital! You still remember it!”

  “I remember all of Ulysses by Tennyson, Grandfather. But I have another surprise for you.”

  Lord Preston put his hand on Owen’s shoulder as the eleven-year-old steered the yacht. “Steady there, steady. You have a surprise, do you? And what is that?”

  “Are you ready for it?”

  “‘The sun is shining, the ship is heeling to port and responsive to the helmsman, fair stood the wind for France. Fire away.”

  Owen’s red hair blew straight back, dark with wet where sea spray had struck. Owen kept his blue eyes focused straight ahead as he recited a different poem:

  Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,

  Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West,

  That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding,

  Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?

  Ah! soon, when Winter has all our vales opprest,

  When skies are cold and misty, and hail is hurling,

  Wilt thou glide on the blue Pacific, or rest

  In a summer haven asleep, thy white sails furling?

  Lord Preston laughed. “Aha! Well done, Commander! I don’t think I know the piece, but it’s full of salt water and sails, isn’t it? Who wrote the poem? How did you come by it?”

  “Dad gave it me. It’s called ‘A Passer-By’ and a dead man named Robert Bridges wrote it.”

  “Dead, was he? Well, he did remarkably well for a dead man.”

  “There’s more to it, but I haven’t memorized all of it yet. Except for the ending.”

  “Let’s hear it then. If it’s a good ending that is, one full of hope and promise.”

  “It is a good ending, Grandpapa. Look at those gulls swoop!”

  “There’s a school close to the surface. Carry on, Commander.”

  And yet, O splendid ship, unhail’d and nameless,

  I know not if, aiming a fancy, I rightly divine

  That thou hast a purpose joyful, a courage blameless,

  Thy port assured in a happier land than mine.

  But for all I have given thee, beauty enough is thine,

  As thou, aslant with trim tackle and shrouding,

  From the proud nostril curve of a prow’s line

  In the offing scatterest foam, thy white sails crowding.

  “Extraordinary! “A purpose joyful, a courage blameless, thy port assured in a happier land than mine.” Let us hope he is right, Owen, and the ship he sees has all that. Let us hope you and I and Pluck have it. Let us pray our whole family has it!”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Lord Preston looked out over the whitecaps in the Channel as the yacht cut through the hard-blue of the water. The poem Owen had recited, especially the last lines, made him think of his far-flung family. He wondered about their courage, their joys, and their situations in the places where they’d settled and called home.

  He had an image of Robbie and Shannon sitting with their daughter under a grove of palm trees in Jerusalem. Robbie was in his uniform, Shannon in a pale-yellow summer dress, Patricia Claire in shorts and a light, white cotton shirt. Patricia was playing in the dust. Around the three of them stood great stones of the great city thousands of years old. Almost as old, he sometimes thought, as civilization. And the dust that whirled in the hot winds seemed as old as the human race itself.

  Another image came but this time of Victoria. Victoria and Ben with zebra running nearby because of lions. And there were Ramsay and Tim, growing tall and dark under the African sun, watching the zebra and the lions, their eyes keen and sharp and clear. Young Tim pointing beyond to the fine line of the horizon, where sky and earth touched at an edge slim as a thread of gold. The elephants were moving slowly there, tall, majestic, silhouetted against the long brightness.

  Catherine and Sean and Angelika at the castle on the Rhine and at the chateau in Pura, Switzerland, were next. They were far from the turmoil in Germany, from the marches at night and the burning torches, Albrecht joining his family in the mountains, red scarf about his neck, papers under his arm, pen in hand. He was writing, writing, with Catherine reading each page and tracing each line of script with her finger.

  Libby and Jane at the Channel, like he and Owen were, watching the mighty Hood steam in and out of port, gulls streaming over its wake. Terry was on the deck at attention and smiling as his family waved. Their lives were solid and sure and impenetrable, strong as dawn over the Atlantic, ribbed with steel like a battle cruiser’s hull slipping over the long, grey depths.

  Dover Sky stood basically empty but for a few summer days. Ashton Park was empty but for Elizabeth, Holly, Harrison, and himself. Jeremy and Emma in London with their twins Peter and James and their little brother Billy at play in streets and alleys and on patches of grass. Edward and Charlotte a block away, with Owen and Colm running with their cousins—not under palm trees or African skies or the ramparts of German castles, but in the shadow of Big Ben and the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace, still free, still unharmed. Kipp and Caroline with them all, and their children Matthew, Charles, and Cecilia growing as tall and straight as any of the others, books and schools and pen
cils and the rumble and rattle of cars and lorries and motorcycles, roadways teeming with traffic and people, sunlight coming through cracks between the high buildings of stone and brick finding them, lighting on them, blessing them.

  “We have come this far, I thank God,” Lord Preston murmured as a wave split in two over the bow. “We have come this far, and we are still together. We have lost some but not all, praise God. Not all. The Lord has granted us a future. I see it just there like I see the coastline of France.”

  “What did you say, Grandfather?” asked Owen. “Do you want me to come about?”

  “Just indulging in a little of my own poetry, Commander. No, carry on to Calais. We’ll sup with French fishermen this evening.”

  “Are we really going all the way to Calais?”

  “It is only twenty-five miles…but perhaps not. Your grandmother would have a fit if we didn’t return in time for high tea. Still, carry on! We won’t come about just yet.”

  “Do you have a poem for me, Grandfather?”

  Lord Preston thrust his hands in the pockets of his peacoat and whistled between his teeth, drawing the flying clouds and blown spume into him along with his breath and all the colors of the sea. “I do! It’s from the Bible—Psalm 19. Mind the wheel and take these words to heart, my sailor.”

  “I shall, Grandpapa.”

  The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.

  Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.

  There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

  Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,

  Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.

  His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

  The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.