There was no mercy. In lightless classrooms, the students memorized facts and learned how to speak the French language; even the French boys were obliged to start over, to eliminate bad habits of speech and ugly accents. War with Germany was approaching. The younger masters, most of whom were officers in the French reserves, seemed eager for it to begin. They assured the boys that France would win because she was the stronger of the two powers. Paul, half American and half German, the worst possible combination of blood from the French point of view, maddened his masters by never forgetting anything while French boys stumbled over their lessons. It was clear to him from the first day that the only useful thing he could take away from this place was its language. After the first few weeks, he made few errors in French, but when he did mispronounce a word or commit a grammatical error, the masters struck him on the backs of his fists with the baton, a thin hardwood wand, raising red welts on chapped skin. During these beatings, the doubled hands had to be held, rigid and immobile, over the desk; it was a sign of defective character to move them. Paul did not move his hands.
Paul was called Boche-Boche. Soon after his arrival, four older boys with overgrown adolescent noses came into his room (a cell, really: iron bed, chair, desk, dresser, chamber pot, striped curtain over the window, writhing china Christ on a varnished pine cross) and found him wearing his sailing sweater as he studied. This was a violation of good form. The sweater was fastened at the shoulder with a row of bone buttons. While three of the boys held Paul down, the fourth, Philippe by name, cut off the buttons with a penknife and attempted to force Paul to swallow them. Paul clenched his teeth and, though Philippe broke off the corner of an incisor, refused to eat the buttons. Fighting all four of the boys at one time was beyond Paul’s capability, so he let them walk away.
His revenge came soon enough. Sport at this school meant soccer, played every afternoon from two to five-thirty. After the soccer master watched him practice, Paul was put into a team with older boys. One of his opponents was Philippe. Dribbling toward the goal, Paul ran into Philippe at full speed and broke his nose. The next day he ran into him again and knocked him to the wet turf. Philippe leaped up and threw a wild punch at Paul. Paul ducked. Philippe swung his fist again. As Battling Jim Cerruti had taught him, Paul blocked it and hit Philippe with four straight lefts on his swollen nose and a right cross that broke a front tooth. Philippe put his hands over his bleeding face and howled in pain. After that, Paul was left in peace.
— 7 —
Paul returned to Rügen in the summer of 1939, the year of his fifteenth birthday. There were E-boats in the harbor and sometimes, looking down from the cliffs in the early morning, he could see German submarines, like great black fishes that had been thought to be extinct, cruising again on the surface of the Baltic. Otherwise, the island seemed unchanged. Life at Berwick was just as it had always been: the conversation, the long walks, the reading, the swims from the shingle beach.
The Christophers sailed much less, but sometimes Hubbard and Lori went out alone at night. Paul, a light sleeper, would wake at dawn and hear their footsteps on the gravel as they hurried toward Mahican’s mooring in order to get aboard before the tide began to run. They never asked him to come along as crew. He never asked them why.
One night, soon after his return, he heard the sound of boots on the gravel beneath his window. He looked out, but there was no moon and he could see no one. The sound of footsteps continued, pacing back and forth on the gravel. Paul looked at his watch. It was three-thirty, nearly dawn, and he smiled, imagining Paulus striding back and forth in the darkness, waiting for Paul to wake at sunrise. Sometimes the old man did that; on chilly mornings he would put on a long sheepskin jerkin that he had worn in the Russian campaign, wearing this garment over his old-fashioned ankle-length nightgown.
Paul dressed and went outside. He used the kitchen door and walked around the house on the soft grass, hoping to surprise Paulus. It was a windless night; there were no stars. Paul walked in the blackness toward the sound of the footsteps. Suddenly, he smelled cigarette smoke. Paulus did not smoke; no one in the family smoked.
“Who is that?” Paul asked.
The footsteps ceased, but Paul could still hear the man’s feet shifting in the gravel. The man switched on a powerful flashlight and shone it in Paul’s face. Shielding his eyes, Paul could make out a leather coat and riding boots. The man did not speak. The flashlight went off. A lighted cigarette spun through the darkness and landed on the gravel in a shower of sparks. Brisk footsteps moved away, over the gravel.
Paul ran after the man. He confronted him. “Who is that?” he asked again. There was no answer. The man turned on his flashlight again and shone it into Paul’s face. Paul jumped to one side, out of the light, and as the man searched for him with the beam of the electric torch, he saw that it was Stutzer, the Gestapo dandy, who had been standing in the darkness, watching Berwick.
Stutzer finally located Paul with the flashlight beam. Still he did not speak, but stood silently in the black, starless night, running the light up and down Paul’s figure for several moments more before switching it off and then marching away over the gravel.
When Paul told this story at breakfast, Lori smiled.
“Ah,” she said, “the Dandy. We should have warned you. He lurks about a lot. You never know when you might run into him.”
“Lurks? Why?”
Lori shrugged. “I think he thinks we’re smugglers. He’s always searching the boat. We hardly ever sail anymore, it’s such a bother to have him come aboard and turn everything inside out.”
“Can’t you do something about that?”
“Maybe someone can give him another crack on the head.”
Hilde von Buecheler cut a piece of cheese and gave it to Paul. “Don’t joke, Lori,” she said. “Don’t teach Paul to joke about these things.”
Paulus was silent; he had been silent all summer.
— 8 —
Paul and Lori, on a morning in August, set off for a walk in the forest. It was an invigorating day, with the smell of fall already in the air. A stiff wind blew in from the Baltic and the sky and the sea were the same luminous shade of gray, the sign of a storm.
It was gray inside the forest, too. They were approaching the Borg, where they always paused to eat their lunch, when Lori sniffed loudly. “Cigarette smoke,” she said. “It can’t be the Dandy at this time of day. He’s a night creature.”
Lori scowled; intruders were common in the tourist season and she was cordial to them, but tobacco smoke annoyed her. She quickened her step, as if determined to drive this intruder, and the fumes of his cigarette, out of the wood.
The cigarette smoker, legs crossed, lounged indolently on one of the temple stones, reading a book; he might have been sitting in his own living room, so much at home did he seem in this forest. He drew deeply on a long cigarette; the smoke hung motionless for a moment in the heavy air, then found a current of wind and vanished. The man caught sight of Lori and Paul; He smiled, stood, and watched them approach, cigarette poised in his left hand. It was a Russian cigarette, a cardboard tube.
The intruder was Otto Rothchild. He stripped off his right glove and held out his hand.
“Baronesse; young Paul. What a surprise. I was just reading some poetry. Really these trees should be Russian birches, but your beeches are rather nice. One can get used to these drab colors; they go with the German light.”
Lori glanced down at Rothchild’s book, a limp volume of Pushkin, bound in leather. “Ah, yes, Hubbard’s Russian,” she said.
Just as she had predicted, Lori had never learned to like Otto Rothchild; she never called him anything but “Hubbard’s Russian.”
“I thought you had left Germany,” Lori said.
“I was in Spain for the war.”
“Naturally you were.”
It exasperated Lori that Otto Rothchild always did the fashionable thing at the fashionable moment. When Bolsheviks were in style, he ha
d collected Bolsheviks. Now he had Nazi friends: not louts who were real believers, but acceptable people who were willing to trade a little decency for an appointment or a uniform or the opportunity to know influential people and make money. Hubbard was intrigued by Rothchild’s lack of scruples. He enjoyed his gossip: the Russian was the best talker Hubbard had ever known: informed, witty, and malicious. Lori never stayed at the table to listen to him.
Rothchild brought adventurers by to meet Hubbard, young men and women. They were invariably beautiful. To a dinner party for Zaentz, just before Zaentz escaped, Rothchild had brought a young lieutenant of army intelligence.
“His name is Bülow,” Rothchild had said. “He’s not one of the real Bülows, but he’s perfect for his new career. He speaks Russian—I taught him myself, he has a lovely accent, like an intelligent serf who’s played with his owner’s son—and he’s willing to betray absolutely anyone. Except, of course, the nobility, so you are immune, Baronesse.”
Perhaps in retaliation for being called Hubbard’s Russian, Rothchild called Lori Baronesse, the title used by the unmarried daughter of a baron, as if marriage to an American changed nothing for a member of her class.
“Otto is a rat,” Lori said to Hubbard. “The rat population always exactly equals the human population. For every human being, living out in the open, there is one rat, hiding between the walls, existing on the garbage of his human host. Otto is your rat, Hubbard. In the days of the valuta it was your dollars. Now it’s your respectability. He gets fat, gnawing away under your table.”
“Nonsense. Otto knows everyone in Berlin.”
“Thanks to good old lovable Hubbard. If he rides around in your pocket, peeping out and sniffing and wiggling his whiskers, then people stop noticing how disgusting he is. You’ve made him into a pet rat.”
“Probably he’s a spy,” Paulus said. “Russians are famous for it.”
Whatever he was, Otto Rothchild prospered. Reading Pushkin in the beech forest by the Borg, he seemed not to have a care in the world.
“It’s marvelously peaceful here,” he said. He sniffed, gazing fixedly at Paul. “What’s in the package?” he asked.
Paul carried their lunch, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. “Bread and cheese,” he said.
“I thought I smelled sausage. One gets very little sausage in Spain. It’s spoiled fish, mostly, and gummy rice.”
“There is sausage,” Lori said. “If you’re hungry, by all means have it.”
Rothchild untied the package. He ate greedily, poking one piece of cheese or sausage into his mouth with another and chewing very thoroughly. He wiped the sausage fat from his fingers and lips with bread, and ate that too. Then he stretched out on his stomach beside the lake and drank like an animal at a water hole. Lori watched every move. Rothchild caught her glance.
“Skills from an earlier existence,” he said. “Paul, would it be a great deal of trouble to bring your father here?”
Lori was glad of a chance to escape. “I’ll fetch him,” she said. “You remain with our guest, Paul.”
Lori tramped away toward Berwick. Paul offered Rothchild the apple he carried in his pocket. Rothchild bit into the apple, removing large circles of white flesh. He chewed noisily and, when he was finished, dropped the core onto the floor of the forest. Paul had never seen such a hungry grown-up. Now that they were alone, Rothchild made no effort to talk to Paul; he was not the sort of man to spend the coins of charm on adolescent boys. He sat down on the stone and went back to reading Pushkin.
It was some time before Hubbard arrived. When he came into the glade, Rothchild made a sweeping gesture of welcome, as if he owned the forest, inviting him to sit down on one of the broken temple stones.
“Have you heard the radio?” Rothchild asked.
Hubbard shook his head.
“Yesterday Germany and Soviet Russia signed a treaty of friendship and military alliance.”
“Nazis and Communists in an alliance?” Hubbard said. “The lunatic Right and the demented Left in bed together? How can they do that?”
“They can do whatever they like,” Rothchild said.
He was never long without a gesture. To punctuate the sentence he had just spoken, he ground the core of the apple into the powdery dirt of the forest floor with the heel of his suede shoe.
“I caused the Bolsheviks some inconvenience in Spain,” Rothchild said. “Now that they are Germany’s allies, things are going to be inconvenient for me, Hubbard.”
“Inconvenient for you, Otto? In what way?”
“In the way things were inconvenient for Zaentz,” Rothchild said. “In the way they were inconvenient for Blau, Schwarz, Eisner, Gerstein, and all your other . . . passengers. Shall I go on? It’s a long list. Everyone knows what you and Lori have been doing with your sailboat.”
“Oh? What do they know, Otto?”
“That the Christophers are angels of mercy. Even the Gestapo knows. In other circumstances I’d advise you to stop your humanitarian work.”
“But not before we smuggle you out of Germany?”
“Exactly. Unless you only help Jews.” Rothchild drew on his Russian cigarette. “I do have a Jewish name—false, but Jewish,” he said.
“And if we don’t?”
“What does that mean, Hubbard—‘And if we don’t?’ If you don’t, you don’t, and that’s the end of it. Did you think I’d denounce you? Do you really imagine that I’m a danger to you?”
“Why not? You know half the Nazi Party.”
“Lucky for me that I do. Horst Bülow told me that my name was on a list handed to the Germans after the pact was signed in Moscow.”
As he spoke, Rothchild tied and untied a knot in the string that had held Lori’s lunch package together. Hubbard took the string and paper out of his hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket.
“What happens,” Hubbard asked, “to those whose names are on the list?”
“They vanish, handed over to the Bolsheviks. They think they can find their way to many others through me.”
“Can they? Are you a Bolshevik?”
“Of course not. Are you? But how many do we know between us? Nobody ever stands up under questioning, Hubbard. You only hold out long enough to lull your conscience for betraying your friends. They wouldn’t kill me, you know; or you, or Lori. Or your child. It would be the camps. Slave labor.”
“All right,” Hubbard said.
“Friendship,” Rothchild said, “is the exile’s only capital.”
— 9 —
It was Paul who led Rothchild down the cliff at midnight and swam with him to Mahican. They sailed without lights, setting a westward course for Falster. Aboard the boat, with Paul at the helm, nobody spoke except Lori.
“Where do you plan to go?” she asked Rothchild. “What will you do?”
“To Paris. I’ll do what I’ve always done.”
“Make friends and use them, you mean.”
Rothchild smiled at her: his charming smile, perfect teeth and liquid eyes.
At this moment, the jib broke loose and whipped wildly around the mast. Mahican had been sailing close-hauled before the wind, her rail awash in a four-foot sea. Hubbard hurried forward and began to struggle with the sail.
Lori leaped out of the cockpit to help him. Hubbard’s big feet slipped on the scrubbed oak planking as he tried to gather the sail into his long arms. He had captured most of it, but when he slipped he lost his grip on the stiff wet canvas and the wind took it, unfurling it like a flag. Hubbard grinned at Lori. She lunged for the sail and went overboard. Hubbard reached for her and missed and then the sail came back and wrapped itself around his head.
Paul dove into the sea after his mother. Though it had been pitch-black aboard Mahican, there seemed to be a little light below the surface. Paul struggled to swim downward. His chest hurt already. He hadn’t got much air in his lungs before he went into the sea. He had seen the place where Lori went under, and his mind had been en
tirely concentrated on following her into this seam in the heaving water. Ten feet below his outstretched hands, he could see his mother. He couldn’t reach her; she didn’t seem to be swimming, but sank with terrifying swiftness, as if she were holding on to a weight.
Paul pressed his arms against his sides and kicked. The water wasn’t deep here, no more than twenty feet, and there were rocks, bearded with weed, on the bottom. Lori settled between two rocks, one arm uplifted, her hair floating away from her face. Paul seized her hair, put his feet on the rock, and pushed off as hard as he could, kicking for the surface. He wanted desperately to take a breath; he did not know how much longer he could keep from opening his mouth. He clenched his teeth and let the water take him up, but he did not move. He kicked, but still his body did not rise. He seemed to have no buoyancy at all.
It did not seem to matter. It occurred to him that his mother might be dead; perhaps she had struck her head when she went overboard. Perhaps it would be best to remain here, to give up the struggle. He knew that he must fill his lungs with water in a matter of seconds; he could not control the instinct to breathe for very much longer. It was very calm down here out of the wind. Paul and Lori were part of the sea, a particle of the deep, moving with it.
Then he saw why they could not float upward toward the surface: Lori was wearing Paulus’s old sheepskin jerkin and the weight of it, soaked with seawater, was drowning them. Paul wrenched his mother’s arms and pulled her out of the sheepskin. Lori began to rise toward the surface. Clutching her hand, Paul kicked against the water, grinding his teeth together to keep from opening his mouth.
The Last Supper Page 7
