Stained Glass

by William F. Buckley

  “Well, that’s for you people to figure out.”

  Spring, his mind on the artistic possibilities of explosives, began asking about the configuration of Wintergrin’s caravan.

  “Look, please. Not tonight. I know you’re on assignment, and I’ll give you what I got. But not tonight, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Spring. “What do you want to talk about? The Yale–Harvard game?”

  Blackford was in just the mood to get up and poke him and, while he was at it, take the little shrimp by the neck, bury his nose in the soup and tell him if there was anything suspicious in it to write it in his notebook. He felt color rising in his cheeks. He got up. “Take care of my bill. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He felt sick, but managed to walk to the pay telephone in the rear and ring Singer. He was at yesterday’s number.

  Singer listened while Blackford spoke. Blackford strained to recall the code name for Erika Chadinoff—there was one for each of a half-dozen St. Anselm-based members of Wintergrin’s staff. “Have you thought of inviting Eleina to the party? It’s not that far from Cologne. She’d probably like to come, get a little relief from the routine. Nice girl, really inquisitive.”

  “Sure,” Callaway said. “I’ll send her a card. I have her address. When are you coming up to Bonn? I’ve got some material here might be useful to you.”

  The interrogatory had a special meaning: It was a summons. “I thought I’d go up tomorrow morning. I’ve got several things to do. I’ll give you a ring.”

  Back in his room, he looked carefully at the light socket. With his lips, he formed the words, Up-yours-Erika.

  Then he sat down and wrote to Sally the most ardent note since arriving in Germany. (“Do you know this is my seventy-first night in this dreary inn without you? Why are you so faithless? What does Chaucer have that I don’t have? You probably think we engineers know nothing about Chaucer. Well, you’re wrong, my favorite of his is Romeo and Juliet. How are you, Juliet? Do you find me like the moon? Do you look out your window in New Haven, see the moon, and tell that impostor in your room, whoever he is, that the moon reminds you of Blacky, your beautiful Blacky who is going crazy without his Juliet? That last line should convince you I’m sick. Come, give me an aspirin. When I finish, I’m going to handcuff myself to the bedpost and enclose the key with this letter. I can go without food or water for four days.…”) Then he tried to read his Goethe, but his mind would not focus on the German. He picked up Whittaker Chambers’ book on the Hiss case, and for a while was absorbed by the account of the net the interrogator drew so artfully, and was struck by the historical irony, as given by Chambers. What he said about himself, Blackford thought, he—Blackford—might as well apply to his own circumstances.…

  “And as, hour by hour, the agony mounted, died away and mounted again, point by damning point, I was more and more bowed under the sense of how much each of us was the prey, rather than an actor, in this historic experience to which what had been best in us had led us, from motives incomprehensible to most of those who watched or heard us, to this end.

  “The exchange with Nixon began almost offhandedly.

  MR. NIXON: Mr. Hiss was your closest friend?

  MR. CHAMBERS: Mr. Hiss was certainly the closest friend I ever had in the Communist Party.

  “Alger Hiss was now sitting behind me among the spectators, surrounded by a little group of friends. As I testified, I could hear Hiss making, sotto-voce sallies, and the titters of the others.

  MR. NIXON: Mr. Chambers, can you search your memory now to see what motive you can have for accusing Mr. Hiss of being a Communist at the present time?

  MR. CHAMBERS: What motive I can have?

  MR. NIXON: Yes. I mean, do you—is there any grudge that you have against Mr. Hiss over anything that he has done to you?

  “That single question slipped the cord on all the pent emotion that had been built up through the day. Until that moment, I had been testifying as a public witness, trying to answer questions carefully and briefly. Now I ceased to answer in that way. As I struggled to control my feelings, slowly and deliberately, I heard myself saying, rather than said: ‘The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.’”

  He put the Chambers’ book down and picked up Time magazine, flipped to the foreign news section, and read there the account of the growing apprehension in the capitals of Europe over the enthusiastic public response to Wintergrin’s speeches and press conferences. “Leaving the amphitheater, the roaring of the crowd still audible, a young man dressed in an old army trenchcoat walked slowly out, dragging his wooden leg like a ball and chain. ‘Don’t they understand? Do they really want another war?’ That was the question all thoughtful men in Europe were asking themselves last week as the dashing young count went from rally to rally preaching his simplistic solution to the problem of a divided Germany. Everywhere the scientists were asking themselves the same question: Is it possible that young Wintergrin actually has access to a nuclear bomb? Everywhere the answer was: ‘Impossible.’ But what is going on in Germany at the moment would have been thought impossible only a few months ago.”

  Blackford threw the magazine on the floor and looked at his watch. It was after midnight. He was tempted to approach the floor lamp and coo, “Goodnight, dear Erika.” Instead he went to the cupboard and poured four ounces of gin into his toothbrush glass, stared at it, walked to the bathroom, and splashed the contents into the toilet. Back in bed he reached impulsively to open the drawer at the bedside, taking out the German hotel Bible. He flipped the pages to the psalms. He read ten of them and then reached for a pencil and his clipboard, and set out to translate the final one. He surveyed the result, and concluded he would not have qualified to serve on King James’s commission. Now, finally, he felt he could sleep. The psalmist had revived his spirits, and as he began to doze off he thought, Really, I must join a religious order, and let other people worry about rights and wrongs. It is only vital, he reminded himself as he dropped off to sleep, to remember that there is a difference between the two.

  CHAPTER 12

  The parents of her friends in America would make references to her “privileged” upbringing and now and then would imply, not without admiration, and not without envy, that she had been spoiled. Sometimes over a weekend visit or vacation, Erika’s hosts, in the effusive style of the forties, would push Erika forward to exhibit one of her accomplishments, even as they might ask an older brother to show off a card trick. Erika went through the usual stages: she would be shy, she would be recalcitrant, she would use evasive tactics, but after her third year at the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut, she surprised everybody who knew her. Her fat friend Alice begged her after dinner one night to play on the piano excerpts from the first movement of the Grieg A-Minor Concerto, which Erika had played before the entire school at the annual concert only the week before—accompanied by the school piano teacher, who knew very little about music, but that didn’t matter because it was recorded and rerecorded that in her youth she had actually studied under Clara Schumann. Erika surprised Alice, and rather dismayed Alice’s parents, who went once every summer to the Lewisohn Stadium when Alexander Smallens did Porgy and Bess and thought themselves thereby to have acquitted a full year’s responsibility to music, by getting up without demurral and proceeding through twenty-two minutes of music, stopping only to sing at the top of her husky voice the parts written by Grieg for the missing orchestra.

  “You certainly are a privileged young girl,” Alice’s mother said admiringly while the father, fearful that his daughter would suggest that Erika play an encore—had Grieg written another concert
o? he worried … everyone knew that Mozart had written over, was it 400 concertos?—clapped loudly, looked at his watch, and said as a treat he would drive them all to the late movie with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby off on the Road to Morocco. The girls went happily to get their coats and Erika had time in the car to muse over her privileged upbringing, in Germany and England, before coming to the United States three years ago at age thirteen.

  Of course, being the daughter of Dimitri and Anna Chadinoff was a privilege, this she did not deny, though she wondered—she truly wondered—what her parents would have done about her if she had not been … clever. She had picked up that word in England and thereafter used it—there being no satisfactory American substitute, as she told Alice. Her friends supposed that her early memories of Germany were of intellectuals and artists coming to her parents’ elegant apartment to eat stuffed goose and read aloud each others poems and short stories and argue long into the night the meaning of a fable by Pushkin. What Erika in fact remembered was the awful physical discomforts and the utter indifference of her father to them. She was very young when she learned that something called “money” was terribly important. When her mother looked into her handbag, either there was money in it or there was not money in it. In the former event Erika would eat dinner, in the latter event she would not. Beginning in midafternoon, Erika would find that her attention was substantially given over to the question, Would there be money that night when her mother opened her handbag? Her mother, though not as stoical as her father, was twice as vague. If, on opening her handbag, she had pulled out a diamond necklace, she’d have said, “Dimitri, dear, I apparently have a diamond necklace here I hadn’t reckoned on.” Dimitri would have said, “That’s fine, my dear,” which he would also have said if his wife had announced that she had found an armadillo in her handbag. Her mother did concern herself for Erika, and in the especially cold winter of 1936, washed dishes at the corner restaurant in return for bread and potatoes left over at the end of the evening’s meal. Sometimes Erika had her dinner at one in the morning on her mother’s return. Sometimes there was food left over from the night before. But sometimes there was no food at all. During these daily struggles her father was always reading or writing. He had access to the public library and spent much of his time there, often taking Erika because that way she could be warm. It was troublesome to do this at first because the guard at the door announced that the library was not a nursery in which to keep little girls. Dimitri Chadinoff asked just when could children be brought into the library, and the answer was: When they are old enough to read. Dimitri turned around, took Erika home, and was with her for three days, interrupted only when Erika could no longer stay awake. On the fourth day, triumphantly, he led her back and was stopped at the same entrance by the same guard. Calmly, Dimitri made his announcement. The guard leaned over from his high desk, put a newspaper into the girl’s hands and, pointing to the headline, said: “Read this, little girl.” Her face solemn, Erika read, haltingly, but without error: “Roosevelt Sweeps Country/Dems Control Both Houses.” She was three years old. Her father showed no particular pride in his daughter, then or later when, at age seven, she earned a few pennies by drilling two dull teenage-boys, sons of a noble family, in English; or when Anna’s friend Valerian Bibikoff, a fellow expatriate from Russia who taught piano and gave lessons to Erika, reported that the girl was singularly talented. Her father was as surprised as if he had been informed that his daughter was remarkable because she had ten fingers. He showed displeasure as rarely as he showed pleasure. When, freshly arrived in England, Erika returned to their flat to say she had made friends at school with the daughter of the Soviet military attaché, Dimitri looked down at her from his desk and told her that he would just as soon she did not associate with the children of barbarians. “Why are they barbarians?” Erika asked in French, that being the only language spoken at the Chadinoff household on Thursdays (Monday, German; Tuesday, English; Wednesday, Italian; Thursday, French; Friday, Saturday, and Sunday any language save the language spoken in the country being inhabited). “They are barbarians,” said Dimitri Chadinoff, “because they wish to obliterate everything important that human beings have learned about how to treat each other in three thousand years.” “Why do they want to obliterate it?”—Erika had no difficulty with unusual words. Her problem, at school, was in learning that some words were unusual: she had to study them attentively and learn to use them with great discretion, or preferably not at all, since at home they were used as nonchalantly as kitchen utensils. She got off to a bad start her first day at Blessed Sir Thomas More’s School in Cadogan Square by asking a girl whether the policies of the school were “latitudinarian.” It was years before she could explain to anyone—the solemn Paul, at the Sorbonne—that she had been guilty of affectation throughout much of her youth only by searching out simple substitute words for those that occurred to her naturally.

  “They want to obliterate it,” said her father, “because they are bewitched by the secular superstition of Communism, which is a huge enterprise that will settle for nothing less than bringing misery to all the people of the world.”

  “Why should they want to bring misery to all the people of the world?” Erika repeated her father’s formulation piously.

  “It isn’t that they want to bring misery, though some do. They strut up and down in their baggy clothes swinging golden chains from their vests as if the keys to happiness were attached. All they have succeeded in doing is killing and torturing people and promising to do as much to people fortunate enough not to live in Russia during this period. To think that they have done it to Russia, the most beautiful land in the world,” said Dimitri Chadinoff, and Anna agreed, recalling how the weather would be now in their native hills outside St. Petersburg.

  “Did they take away all your money?” Erika wanted to know.

  “Yes, they took away all our money.”

  Such an indifference as Dimitri Chadinoff’s to money had not been seen since the natives begged St. Francis to accept a copper if only to have the pleasure of giving it away. But he did not deign to express where, in the hierarchy of Soviet offenses, the loss of the family money had come. Infra dignitate. Erika, a thoughtful girl, assumed that her father was correct but promised herself one day to think the matter over more exhaustively, and turned to her homework in mathematics, which she was always pleased to express her concern with because she knew it was the single subject in which neither her father nor her mother could help her.

  “What exactly is an integer? I don’t understand.”

  “Ask your teacher. He’s getting well paid,” said her father.

  Well, not so well paid by modern standards, but the school was well staffed and now Dimitri was making five pounds per week translating for a London publisher on a piecemeal basis, and that same publisher had sent out Chadinoff’s fresh translation of Pushkin to be assessed by scholars at Oxford and Cambridge. “I could advise you,” Chadinoff wrote to his editor, “which of the scholars at Cambridge and Oxford are competent to evaluate my work, but I suppose that if you agreed to accept my judgment in the matter the entire enterprise would be circular. Anyway, for the record the only man at either university who has the necessary background is Adam Sokolin at Cambridge. He studied under my old tutor, who beat some sense into him thirty years ago. Sokolin has done good work on Pushkin, from which we may safely conclude that he will not get very far in Cambridge.” The editor took the letter by the corner, his fingers raised as if carrying a dead rat by the tail, walked into the office of his superior, dropped it on his desk and asked: “Have I your permission to tell this egomaniac to go and peddle his Pushkin elsewhere?”

  The next day, manuscript back in hand, Chadinoff sent it to the Harvard University Press. The following day, the London publisher dropped him as a part-time editor and then, after Erika had gone to sleep, Anna took Dimitri aside and, even though it was Tuesday, spoke to him in Russian and said that they had to do something to bring i
n some money, that all their friends and relatives were equally impoverished, that there was no money for the next week’s rent, nor for the next month’s school bills for Erika. Well, said Dimitri—ever so slightly disposed to point out, by twiddling his fingers on the open page of his book, that Anna had interrupted his reading—did she have any suggestions? Yes, she said, she had recently been talking to her friend Selnikov (former colonel in the Czar’s prime equestrian unit). Poor Sergei Babevich had not only himself and his wife to look after but three daughters and a son. He had taken a position as a maître d’hôtel at a medium-priced restaurant where a knowledge of several languages was useful. “The trouble with you, dear Dimitri, is that your knowledge of food is really not very refined. You could write a scholarly book about the feasts of Lucullus, but you would not be able to distinguish the actual food from fish and chips at Lyons. So I have another idea.”

  Dimitri had sat without any show of emotion thus far. “Well?”

  Anna couldn’t, at first, remember what her other idea was, and Dimitri waited. Finally the newspaper caught her eye.

  “Ah yes. There is an advertisement in the paper for a concierge. He must be presentable—here.” She reached for the paper, shuffling through to the marked section. “Presentable, must be fluent in French and German. Some Italian and Spanish desirable. References.”

  Dimitri took the job. His hours were from one until midnight. He would sleep until six and then resume his own work. Erika was not permitted to see her father at the hotel during working hours. Once she decided mischievously to do so. She was small for twelve years, so that her head only just reached the counter. She had on a friend’s hat, and her light-brown hair was knotted under it. She put on spectacles and, carrying a handbag, she said in a little girl’s voice, imitating her father’s own imperious accent and speaking in German: “Concierge, please get me a sleeper to the Finland Station!” Dimitri permitted himself a smile, and then in Russian said to her: “Get yourself out of here, Rikushka, before I invite the manager to paddle your behind.” She went out roaring, and told her mother, who laughed, and then said not, ever, to do such a thing again. The following morning, when she went off to school, she found tucked into her notebook, in her father’s unmistakable hand, a fable dedicated to her. It was called, “The Little Girl Who Took the Train to the Finland Station, and Woke Up Lenin.” That day, she thought, she was closer to her father than she had ever been before.