“Will it frighten us all, Count Wintergrin?” Erika Chadinoff asked.
“I cannot say whether it will frighten you, Erika,” said Wintergrin. “It is certainly designed to frighten the Russians.”
“How much of it will be bluster, Axel?” Only Roland Himmelfarb, who treated Wintergrin like a protective brother, would thus have addressed him or, for that matter, would have put such a question to him in the presence of others.
“That much of what I say that makes me sound like Gandhi will be bluster. Gandhi was right—like the Bhagavad-Gita—in saying that the whole of one’s resources must be mobilized to consecrate a purpose. He was wrong in supposing that no human being is finally monstrous enough to run a locomotive over the incremental resister. The Communists are. That is why we shall have to be prepared to do more than Gandhi was ever prepared to do.”
Oakes’s heart began to pound.
“Who says A must say B,” Wintergrin said, quoting Trotsky. And interrupted himself in mid-thought. “Have you read James Burnham’s Machiavellians? Anybody? Spread it around.” He pointed his finger at Himmelfarb, among whose responsibilities was the distribution to the inner guard of books and articles that attracted Wintergrin’s attention.
“You were about to say, Count Wintergrin?” Erika Chadinoff said. She had violated Blackford’s self-imposed protocol: never to push Wintergrin toward sensitive subjects, even by redirecting his own train of thought. Let him say things as he chose.
“Oh yes”—Wintergrin looked distracted—“it follows that we shall have to rearm.”
There was silence. Wintergrin proffered nothing more. Himmelfarb smoked. Erika Chadinoff looked into the fireplace. Blackford noticed her hair as if coming to life, and the blue liquid eyes, and the inscrutable set of full red lips that pouted with curiosity and passion. Blackford leaned over and picked up the countess’s cat, stroking her.
Wintergrin broke the silence. “I am glad, Erika, that you made your suggestions well before next Monday. Please thank your father for advancing so shrewd a point. It will prove very, very helpful. I shall let you have the draft of my speech well ahead of anyone else.” He rose and, as the others did, turned to Blackford, but his words were addressed equally to all.
“I regret to say that beginning tomorrow we shall be instituting, a formal security system. I put it off as long as possible, but Jürgen Wagner is of course right. He is the chief security officer, and he is justified in saying that security officers should have something to say about security … so, it has to be done.
“Beginning at six a.m. tomorrow there will be guards at the entrance to the courtyard, in addition to guards here, outside the castle. The telephone people will be here tomorrow to install extra lines, including a line to the new guardhouse. External security—outside St. Anselm’s, on the road—will be supplied by the federal government. On top of everything else, Wagner has persuaded me to admit an amiable young gorilla into my entourage, a young man devoted to our cause who has taken a leave of absence from the police academy at Dortmund to serve as my bodyguard. His name is Wolfgang something-or-other—I have not met him, but Wagner promises me he is humorless, discreet, literal, and will not grow taller than his current height, which is six feet four. The type, I gather, who will not allow me into my own headquarters unless I prove I am myself. I mention this because he will arrive tomorrow, and I do not wish to frighten you if you should find him—a, line from Milton, Oakes? Did you, at Greyburn, study with old Potpot? He read us all of Paradise Lost. I remember only a few lines:
Whence and what are thou, execrable shape,
That dar’st, though grim and terrible, advance
Thy miscreated Front athwart my way
To yonder Gates?
Wintergrin grinned with pleasure and, his friends now warned about the terrible Wolfgang, turned, businesslike once more, to Blackford:
“Would you, Oakes, drive Miss Chadinoff back to the inn? I must go with Roland to the study. I shall see you tomorrow at the chapel, two p.m. Goodnight.” He bowed slightly to both of them and walked away, leaving Himmelfarb to show them to the door.
Would Erika care for a drink before retiring?
Of course.
They settled in the corner table in the near-empty Bierstube at the Westfalenkrug, forlorn, always, on Monday evenings. She wore a dark-blue skirt and a turquoise blouse and a commanding scent Blackford never knew before, which he reminded himself to ascertain the name of, to send his mother, whose only indulgence was exotic perfumes. She spoke to the waiter in preemptively fluent German. In the dim light they were silent for a moment.
“He is something, isn’t he?” she began.
“He certainly is. I hope he doesn’t turn out to be ‘somebody’ in the sense that Gavrilo Princip was ‘somebody.’”
“Who?”
“The guy who started the First World War at Sarajevo by knocking off the Archduke.”
“You don’t really think that, do you, Mr. Oakes?” “Call me Black. Do I really think so?” He thought it prudent to retreat. But cautiously …
“Of course I don’t think so, in the sense that I predict Apocalypse. On the other hand, unless somebody does a lobotomy on Stalin he isn’t going to hand over East Germany to our hero on account”—Blackford here imitated the well-known accents of Greta Garbo—“of his beautiful blue eyes.”
“You sound like a cynic.”
“I’m not a cynic! I profoundly believe in the sincerity of Stalin’s evil intentions.”
Erika paused, began a smile, then suppressed it. “How long have you known him?”
Black explained that he was by profession an engineer, commissioned by the Marshall Plan people to preside over the recreation of St. Anselm’s chapel, and had met Wintergrin only a month or so earlier.
“Isn’t it unusual, at your age, to be put in charge of something like this?”
Blackford wondered whether Erika’s curiosity on this rather delicate point reflected something she had heard from Wintergrin or his associates. He decided on hyperbole, as against the alternative of a pompous recitation of his formal credentials.
“I’m older than Alexander was when he conquered Persia,” Blackford said, in exaggerated dejection. “I’m embarrassed they gave me the chapel at St. Anselm’s to rebuild instead of the cathedral at Cologne.” She didn’t answer, so he seized the initiative.
“What brought you to our leader’s staff?”
“Blackford, in Germany we do not use that expression.”
“Sorry. What brought you to our hero’s staff?”
“It was my father’s idea. You … know about my father?”
“At Yale, engineers are taught to recognize the names of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Chadinoff.”
She actually blushed, and added, “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Oh, come on. I know you didn’t. There are plenty of people who don’t know who your father is, but I’m not one of them.
You see, I’m crazy-mad about bees. I hang on every word your father writes about them.”
Erika was amused, and relaxed, and she smiled her pleasure at the conversation, and at the company. Her father would especially have enjoyed the exchange. Dimitri Chadinoff was famous as an apiarist, as one would say da Vinci was famous as a biologist. After leaving Russia in 1917, her father had come, if not to dominate, to figure hugely in the world of critical letters in three languages and in three countries. His works of imagination, evocation, and playfulness were grist for what sometimes seemed half the critics and graduate students of the world. From his eyrie in Switzerland—he despised the atmosphere at the level of the sea, and confessed, at a moment of singular candor with a visitor, that he thought the air pressure at sea level spiritually as well as metallurgically corrosive—he vouchsafed to the world one book per year, and always in its interstices one could experience the passion with which he scorned the political, social, and artistic work of the Communists in Russia.
Erika sai
d, “In my father’s other life—away from the bees—he has achieved a certain reputation as a verbal precisionist. He felt Wintergrin needed some help at this level.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“You remember what Pravda did with his Heidelberg Manifesto in 1948? Wintergrin said, ‘Germans must embrace their fellow Germans.’ That got translated into Russian as ‘Germans must hang their fellow Germans.’ And appeared under the headline: ‘German Warmonger Demands Execution of Democratic Germans’—and story after story was broadcast in East Europe playing this line. My father’s feeling is that although there is no way to prevent the Russians from distorting what Wintergrin says, we should at least try to make it hard for them. The idea is to send out exact translations from the German several hours before he delivers his speeches. Send out translations in Russian and Polish as well as in English, Italian, and French. In the Western languages there isn’t as much to fear in the way of intentional distortion. But accuracy is terribly important …”
“So your job?”
“Is to supervise the translations. As a matter of fact”—her voice affected academic pomposity, effective except that laughter broke out—“my Polish is a little rusty.”
Blackford whistled. “You mean, you can handle all the other languages with—precision?”
“Yes,” she said. “You do know that I am a translator by profession?”
“Well, sure,” Black said. “Rubinstein is a musician by profession. But he isn’t expected to perform on the bass fiddle, and the piccolo, and the harp.”
Erika nodded to the waiter, and pointed to her empty glass. Blackford, without looking away, raised his glass too, which the waiter removed, coming back in due course with replacements.
She said, “I shall retain one, perhaps two assistants to help. I gather from Himmelfarb that up to now Wintergrin has spoken mostly extemporaneously. If he continues to do so our job will be more difficult. We can rush out authorized translations, but the misconstructions get out ahead of them. He promises that beginning Monday at Frankfurt he’ll try to get us his speech twenty-four hours ahead. That will mean round-the-clock work, getting that speech into seven languages.”
“Let me know if you need any help with some of his tricky German words,” Blackford said.
“I will.” Erika’s face lit up. “I’d offer to help you with the stained glass, but I know what an expert you are on it.”
Blackford smiled at her suggestively and twirled his glass in his hand. What in the hell does she mean by that, he wondered. And repressed the thought. Hell, a few more years in this business and he would be suspicious of Shirley Temple. Come to think of it, how account for that sequence of miscegenative suggestiveness between Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson? Ah! Could that have been one of the scripts of the Hollywood Ten! To start all that commotion in the South! Senator Bilbo was right!
“What are you smiling about?” Erika asked him.
“Oh, just a little fantasy. I was entertaining myself … er, playing with myself.” He looked up, and his smile was to the point.
“Tell me.”
“Well,” said Blackford, “I wondered whether maybe you were a spy from the camp of Konrad Adenauer, and whether you would make it your business in your translations to make our leader—our hero—sound hungry for the roar of tanks and the smell of death. But I put it out of my mind, because I’m the trusting type.”
She did not say anything, though her smile was expressive, amused, coquettish, and Blackford’s thought meandered during the silence on how pleasurable it would be to take her to bed. They would walk hand in hand across the street to the inn, and in ten minutes he would scratch lightly at her door, she would open it, and he would sidle in through the opening. How unthinking all those writers who take it for granted in their novels that men can slide into the bedchambers of their trysts past reluctant doors opened only just wide enough to accommodate the width of their lateral frame at rest: Erika would open the door wide enough for him to walk in frontally. He would speak to her only in a child’s German as he softly removed her nightgown and, moving her into the moonlight, press against her, and then tease her, using the German words just slightly, pertly, provocatively wrong, provoking her didactic instincts, and then intentionally misunderstanding her instructions, as he laid her down and—he bit his lip, feeling sweat on his brow, and dryness in his mouth. He caught her eye, she returned his glance fully and, with her eyes, said No. In seven languages.
CHAPTER 9
The Frankfurt convention, as the occasion was ever after referred to, dispelled any lingering complacency in Moscow, in Washington, and in Bonn. The meeting was held on October 15 in the old homesite of the Frankfurt National Assembly, the imposing Paulskirche. Reporters, television and movie cameramen trained their attention on the assembly, endeavoring to discern any special characteristics. There were none. There were burghers and farmers and merchants. There were at least five hundred student-aged men and women. Here and there those who knew the academic elite spotted a distinguished professor. Moreover, the assembly was composed not merely of the curious. This was a formal political convention fashioned after the American model, brought together for the purpose of nominating the leader of the Reunification Party. Everyone there, except the press and a few hundred friends and family, was a delegate or an alternate delegate—almost three thousand in all. They were accredited members of the movement, committed to its cause, and they came from every part of Germany.
There was music from a considerable orchestra—conveniently situated in the choir—as expected; but no hilarity. Germans had gone a long time since experiencing a political convention, and most did not even know what traditional behavior at a German political convention was. But the mood was set by the clear historical mandate of the meeting: to validate the claim to leadership of a young man who had risked his life to free Germany from domestic tyrants, and was prepared to risk it again to free Germany from foreign tyrants. To this awesome end this party was convened, formally consecrating itself; and from that exhilarating purpose it drew its strength. During the day the delegates heard a number of speeches from regional representatives of the party. The platform committee cautiously refrained from specifying the means by which the goal the party sought would be achieved: that exegetical responsibility would be for the party leader, in his own time, to discharge. So the platform was merely a paraphrasing of the speeches of Axel Wintergrin.
At six there was a break for dinner. The balloting was at eight. With no competing candidate, the balloting and the formal designation were a formality. At three minutes after nine the chairman of the convention rang down the gavel and announced that the leader and candidate of the Reunification Party was—Axel Wintergrin. The crowd rose, cheering from the heart, as the slim young man, dressed in his familiar tweed suit, walked out to the podium. The cheering would not stop, even though Wintergrin raised his right hand imploring the audience to be still as, with his left, he buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket. The restoring of order would take another fifteen minutes and, of course, comparisons were extruded in much of the press with the hypnotic ovations given to Adolf Hitler. But there were men and women there who had been at Hitler’s rallies and they knew the difference: Hitler was preaching the necessity of asserting the national will for the purpose of aggrandizing The State and hating The Enemy. Wintergrin also preached the necessity of mobilizing the national will—but in order to undo a legacy of Hitler: the loss of one half the nation. Wintergrin’s objectives were unassailable: No one, save a few German Communists who counted it more important that East Germans should live under Communism than that they should live as free men in a single German republic, could doubt the desirability of the goal. The quarrel, and the indecision, were over the question of means.
Axel Wintergrin could no longer put off specific statements of his intentions if elected, so he arrived quickly at the eagerly anticipated “platform of policies.”
—The Soviet Union would
be given an ultimatum: To conduct free elections in East Germany under United Nations supervision by February 1.
—If the people of East Germany opted for reunification, that must be effected by April 1. (At the press table there was commotion. No one had suspected a timetable so wildly audacious.) Wintergrin did not bother even to allude to the hypothetical possibility that the East Germans would vote against reunification. To have done so, he implied, would have been to dishonor rational processes.
—If the Russians declined to hold the elections, the Government of West Germany would declare war against—and here Wintergrin said it carefully, twice, exactly—not against the Soviet Union, but against any Soviet agent, irrespective of his nationality, who continued illegally to reside in East Germany.
—To achieve the strength to carry out that war against foreign invaders, the West German Government would rearm. Such provisions in peace treaties, finalized or prospective, as forbade such rearmament would be considered null and void inasmuch as they were imposed on a people at the expense of that people’s freedom, in violation of the United Nations covenant on human rights and of the axiomatic rights of nations, to rule themselves. No German weapons, said Count Wintergrin, would be aimed at anyone outside the boundaries of Germany.
—But this pledge, Count Wintergrin said, was contingent on no foreign troops being sent into Germany. If such troops were sent in, Germany would retaliate against the aggressor as necessary.
—Finally he came to the means. “I am in touch,” said Count Wintergrin, “with German scientists who are agreed that rather than risk the annihilation of the German people, whether resident in East or in West Germany, they will make available to our own army the definitive weapon of defense.”
He could not deliver his carefully prepared peroration. The crowd would not permit him to go on. The press was stampeding out to their typewriters, telephones, cable offices. The cameramen pulled out reels of film to be whisked off to the developers, and with fresh reels photographed the hysteria of the crowd. It was the hysteria of a people who only a few years earlier had been summoned to sacrifice everything for a cause that proved ignoble—and now were being asked to be prepared to sacrifice everything for a cause indisputably fine. It was the full cry of gratitude for a formula to erase, insofar as it was possible to do so, the awful consequences of the things done in the name of the German people. It was the road to self-esteem.
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