by Belva Plain
“Papa, with all due respect to you, how can you talk like that when, even in school, they are preparing us to leave?”
“Gina is studying modern Hebrew to be ready for Palestine,” her mother explained. “She knows how to do laundry, she’s learning dressmaking and practical nursing. She’ll be able to support herself, which is more than I can do.”
“Palestine!” Joachim cried. “For how many centuries have we been here in Germany? Ever since the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and for some of us, centuries before that, a thousand years or more under the Roman Empire. How much more German can one be? To talk of emigration, of leaving it all,” he said emotionally, “is fantastic. For God’s sake, I belong to the Federal Union of Jewish War Veterans, I have the Iron Cross! Leave Germany? Desert our homeland now just because she’s going through a bitter time? Ach, what’s the use! And here you’ve come to dinner to listen to all this heavy argument. Liebchen, get the dessert, please. What have you made for us?”
“Pflaumetorte.” Elisabeth rose at once.
Gina stood up, and the two who were female cleared the table. Young Klaus, being male, sat with his elders to be waited on. A German atmosphere indeed, Paul thought.
Joachim lit a lamp on the buffet. It had grown darker outside. “Heavy clouds,” he said. “It’s snowing.” He lit another lamp, enlivening the dark hangings and the heavy furniture. When he returned to the table, he spoke with obvious intent to clear the atmosphere.
“She’s a darling, my wife, but she talks nonsense sometimes. Palestine! What, shall we pick olives or herd sheep? It’s all rocks and sand, from what one hears. Well, they’re all upset and understandably. But one must be calm. Without calmness we shall fall apart. I’ll take you to meet the rabbi tomorrow. Ah, what a handsome torte! And after dinner, we shall have some music. Elisabeth shall play for us. It’s a good night for Chopin. He makes one think of spring and Majorca and the blue sea. Yes, after you have served the coffee, Elisabeth, you will play Chopin,” repeated Joachim, thus bringing the discussion to an end and showing who was master in the house.
The rabbi’s house, though as darkly and richly furnished as Joachim’s, was smaller and much more crowded with books. The four walls of the study were covered with them from top to bottom; the rabbi’s white head appeared from Paul’s side of the desk, above another pile of books and documents. He looked like a rabbi, Paul thought, like one of the ancients, a Maimonides with a hawklike profile and luminous eyes.
“We are all of us very moved by your generosity, Herr Werner, that of the American community and your personal gift.”
Seven men were present, in addition to Joachim and Paul. From their manner and dress Paul, who had a “nose” for such things, identified them: with the exception of one professor, they were men in authority, used to leadership, owners of factories and large establishments.
He told them, “The American community is still not doing enough. Too many of us still don’t realize what’s really happening. In fact, I think that there are some right here in this country who don’t realize it either.”
The rabbi nodded. “That’s all too true, Herr Werner. It’s very complicated. There were some who committed suicide when the Nazis came to power and there were others who stiffened themselves. Well, of course, that has happened throughout our history whenever persecutions break out. So it is.”
Paul’s eyes traveled over inanimate things so as to avoid the circle of troubled faces, and came to rest at a small landscape that stood on an easel near a window. The rabbi followed his gaze.
“Charming, isn’t it? A gift from my congregation after thirty-five years. It’s forbidden to show his work in the galleries today. It’s forbidden to play the music of Mendelssohn, too. Yes, they think it will be just Jews who suffer. But already hundreds of Protestant pastors have been arrested. These criminals have no regard for Christianity either. Did not Nietzsche call it a curse and a perversion? The only truth was war: women to give birth to fighters and men to fight.”
“I am sixty-five years old,” said the professor, “and when I was a student at the University of Berlin, I heard that kind of teaching even then.”
“I had a letter last week,” the rabbi said. “You used to live in Munich, Joachim, you knew Dr. Ilse Hirschfeld. They’ve taken her son away.”
“Is that so? Yes, she was Elisabeth’s doctor. Paul, you remember her.” And Joachim explained, “We had some trouble, an accident, one day when Paul was there.”
An accident! Paul thought. And he asked, “What happened, Rabbi?”
“She writes that he was passing out antiwar pamphlets when he was arrested. An exceptionally bright young man, I recall. She doesn’t know where he is. She’s desperate.”
“He’s a young, misguided socialist,” Joachim said. “Always was.” He spoke irritably. “My daughter, Gina, too. I only hope she stays out of trouble.”
The rabbi continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Mario. They named him after a relative on his father’s side who went to Italy after the Russian Revolution and took an Italian name. As a matter of fact, Ilse had been preparing to go to Italy to join those relatives. But she wanted to keep earning some money here while she learned enough Italian to pass the licensing examinations. A great upheaval, a new language, a new start … Terribly difficult. And now this. Ah, well.” He looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, but I have another appointment. It’s very hard these days to keep everything in one’s memory, all the lists and appointments. We don’t put anything on paper,” he explained to Paul, “not even the minutes of our meetings. Everything must be committed to memory, and at my age that’s not easy,” he added with a rueful smile. “Anyway, I want to thank you again on behalf of all of us. God take you safely back to America, and please pray for us here. Pray that the storm will pass.”
“He doesn’t believe it will pass, though,” Paul said as he walked out with Joachim.
“Perhaps not.”
Their feet crunched on the previous night’s fallen snow. Ice crystals glittered on posts and railings. The air was clean and keen in the nostrils; the world looked optimistic in the winter sunlight, making the inner burden all the heavier.
“That’s a terrible thing about Dr. Hirschfeld,” Paul said presently.
“I know. She probably doesn’t know where to turn. No connections, being an immigrant and a woman besides.” Paul hardly remembered what she looked like, only that they had warmed each other at a time when both needed warmth. And he wondered whether she had found a man who was right for her. A man would be fortunate to have her; kind, sensible and wonderful in bed …
“Is there no way you can help her?” he asked.
“No. I used to have connections. But these days you can’t be sure who wants to remember you and who would rather not be reminded that you were once friends. I can’t take a chance.” Joachim seemed to be arguing with himself. “Can’t risk my own neck.” He glanced over at Paul, who was staring straight ahead, and then changed the subject. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you entertainment, a concert or something. But it’s not advisable to appear in public places, one isn’t—” he gulped as though there were something in his throat.
Paul stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Dear Joachim,” he said very gently, “I don’t wish to revive last night’s argument, but tell me honestly: You do know in your most secret heart, you do know, don’t you, that you’ll have to leave here eventually?”
The other man looked away from Paul and blinked against the glitter of snow. “Perhaps. Unless things change for the better. If they don’t, yes, then we shall have to go.”
“As long as you don’t wait too long.”
By the end of the week, Paul was ready to say good-bye. Having done all he could do in Germany, at least for the present, he felt a rush of desire to free himself from German air. Once in Paris, he would breathe lightly again.
Yet it was painful to part from the Nathansohns.
He feared to think of what might bec
ome of them, forced out of this world into which they had been born, and through which his taxi, on the way to the station, was now taking him. It was a world of comfortable homes, of museums, parks, and shops full of fine things; a world of concerts, libraries, and schools. But it was crumbling.… One afternoon, while he accompanied Elisabeth on a brief household errand, they’d had to stop at a curb to let a short procession go by, some two dozen middle-aged men, each wearing a placard reading I AM A JEWISH PIG. The effect of this sight on an otherwise normal, workaday street was surreal. Every pulse in Paul’s body had been jumping. The most remarkable thing, he had thought, was that the passersby on the street had paid so little attention to the utter horror of it.
After a moment, as though she had read Paul’s mind, Elisabeth had said, “It happens all the time. We’re used to it by now.”
He had asked her what was to happen to the men they had just seen.
“It depends. They’ll be taken to the police station where they’ll be beaten up. Sometimes tortured. It’s a question of who’s in charge, what mood they’re in. But before anyone’s release, if he is released, he has to sign a statement saying that no one has harmed him.”
“If he refuses to sign?”
“That would be very foolish, or maybe very noble and brave, according to how you want to look at it, because the next stop is one of the camps.”
Then she’d said, “I suppose that’s what happened to Mario Hirschfeld. He wouldn’t sign a statement like that. He’d die first. He’s the kind of man who can believe in something enough to die for it. Do you understand, Cousin Paul?”
Ah, yes … how always willing they are, the best of our youth, to die for something!
“I understand,” he’d answered gently.
“If there were more people like Mario, there wouldn’t be”—she’d stopped for a moment and gone on—“if I only knew somebody important! There are people in the Nazi party, among the authorities, who can get people out of the camps. Not always, but if you have money and know whom to go to, sometimes.”
That had been one of the most painful episodes in Paul’s whole week of sharp impressions. The recollection of it rode with him now and was with him while he paid the driver, carried his bags into the terminal, and stood in line to buy his ticket to Paris.
The line was long. He stood with his bags at his feet and inched forward. Surrounded by the usual rush and commotion of the railroad station, he was yet seeing a different picture, or rather a collage of pictures: the men with the PIG signs, blood streaming from Joachim’s head, Ilse Hirschfeld in her white coat, and Elisabeth telling him that “Mario would never sign … Mario would die first.”
Something happened. Herr von Mädler, Paul thought. He had been a Werner client since before the last war, after all. Because his wife was an American, the family assets in the United States had not been frozen as enemy alien property, and because the Werner firm had managed them with skill, the assets had grown and handsomely supported the von Mädlers during the German inflation. He owes me something, Paul thought. At the same time, he remembered with disgust that meeting at which the man had predicted the last war and denounced all pacifists as degenerates, Communists, women, or Jews. “Not like you, of course, Herr Werner. A different type of Jew.”
But such a man would have important contacts in the government. He owes me something, Paul thought again as he progressed toward the ticket window.
What a crazy impulse! To extend himself for a woman he hadn’t seen for thirteen years, or for her son whom he had never seen!
And yet … “Mario would die first.” Dan would, too, if he were here. The world moved forward inch by inch, like this line, because of such people. So if he could save one life … that’s what he had come for.…
He had reached the ticket window. He took out his wallet.
“First-class ticket to Munich,” he said.
There were a few gray threads in her dark hair, which was still drawn simply into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her eyes lay in the shadows that form and deepen, as nights without sleep follow one after the other. Except for these, Ilse Hirschfeld had not aged. She stood now in the authority of her white doctor’s coat, with her forehead calm and her words direct.
“But why, Paul? Because we slept together?”
He looked around the room, as if to find some explanation that would not be grandiose, making her too pitiable. But the room, being merely the consulting room with its desk, its few straight chairs, diplomas, and shelves of books, offered no help.
“Why you?” she repeated. “Because I took care of Joachim Nathansohn that day? He hasn’t come forth, important as he is.”
“People are afraid, you know that. They have their own families to think of. But I’m an American. I can afford to try. If you ask me why I want to—” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I have a need, that’s all.”
Mud-colored clouds hung in the sky beyond the window. Ilse lit a lamp, and suddenly out of the gloom a face emerged, the face of a young man framed in leather, on a table in the corner. Paul, leaning closer, saw large melancholy eyes and a full tender mouth, a beauty both masculine and Eastern.
She followed Paul’s gaze. “Yes, that’s Mario.”
“Let’s get down to business,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Mario is a peace activist. I warned him over and over. This isn’t the time for pamphleteering, I said. The country has gone mad, you won’t do any good, you’re risking yourself for nothing. Of course, he wouldn’t listen. So they came for him one night. They pounded on the door. It’s terrifying. You can’t imagine, at two o’clock in the morning, those angry men coming into the house. They took him away.” She put her fingers to her lips. In a moment she resumed. “I went to the police station in the morning. They wouldn’t tell me anything. I kept going back and back, until they threatened me, too, and so I don’t go anymore and I still don’t know anything.”
A human being disappears, evaporates into space. How had the German people allowed this to happen? At home, when that man Palmer overstepped the bounds of decency and law, he was pulled down from his high place; Americans wouldn’t have him.
Paul controlled himself. “I have a contact, I think, an influential man. I don’t say I’ll be able to help. I only say I can try.”
“It will cost money. I know how those things work.” Ilse’s hands twisted in her lap. “And I have none. My practice has fallen way off. Aryans are not allowed to come to me. I had a good necklace and a pair of bracelets, but I sold them and now there’s nothing.”
“You needn’t worry about that. I’ll have whatever is needed.”
She was silent a moment, looking out at the darkening sky. Then she said as she turned back to Paul, “If I try to thank you with all that’s in my heart, I’ll cry, and that will embarrass you, I think.”
“You’re right. It wouldn’t do either one of us any good,” he said. “Is that coffee, there in that thermos jug? A hot cup will be all the thanks I want.”
“Of course. Let me get a coffee cake to go with it.”
When she returned from the kitchen, she looked more troubled.
“I’ve been thinking, perhaps I shouldn’t let you do this. There have been cases of foreigners being arrested, accused of aiding the Communist underground.”
“If they were that stupid, the American consul would get me out.”
“You might not recognize yourself after the couple of days it would take to get you out.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
She studied him. “I’m curious. What brings you to Germany in these times, anyway?”
When he told her what he had been doing in England and here, she warned him again.
“They must know you. They know who’s active in every country, who’s on all the committees raising funds. They read the Jewish press in every language. You don’t know how thorough they are. There’s a special branch of the security service, and it’s right here in Munich.
No, it’s too dangerous, I can’t let you.”
“But I want to. Don’t try to change my mind.”
“My son is probably dead already. One day they’ll ring the bell and bring in a coffin, sealed, which I shan’t be allowed to open, and they’ll tell me he died of a heart attack. That’s how it will be.”
Never had Paul seen such anguish in human eyes.
“Then all the more reason to act quickly.”
“How good you are,” she murmured. “It’s the only hope, that there are still good people in the world. My grocer whispered to me—he’s not supposed to sell to Jews, but he saves some milk and eggs for me—he whispered, ‘What can I do? I would like to do something, but I’m afraid.’ ”
Paul stood up, feeling, above and beyond tremendous sorrow, a surge of energy. Was there a kind of vanity in his wish to endanger himself? Yet there was also the ancient admonition: To save one life is to save the whole world. He was charged with excitement.
“We must waste no time. I want to get back to the hotel, make that call and, if I’m lucky, arrange for a car.”
The von Mädler villa stood near the river, where Paul had once walked so many years before.
He had had no trouble getting the appointment. Von Mädler had been quite willing, thinking no doubt that the American banker had something agreeable to report concerning his, or rather his wife’s, investments. Yet some of yesterday’s certitude had died in Paul; now almost at von Mädler’s front door, he was still not quite sure how he ought to proceed.
A dumpy, rusty-haired woman, strikingly like a little red hen, answered his ring. She wore no uniform so, although she did not introduce herself, he assumed her to be the lady of the house.
“Herr von Mädler is expecting you,” she told him. “This way.”
She left him at the door of a sunny room, with flowering plants and a wall of windows overlooking a lawn. In a chair near the windows, evidently enjoying the heat that poured in through the glass, sat the man Paul remembered. He did not rise, nor offer his hand, but merely called, “Good day, Herr Werner, it’s been a long time. Sit down.”
