As Time Goes By

by Michael Walsh

  Instinctively she reached across the backseat of the taxi to take Victor's hand and was momentarily surprised when it wasn't there.

  A natural linguist, she had been studying Slavic languages, with a concentration in Russian. Her father had encouraged her. “We Scandinavians cannot expect the people of Europe to learn our languages, Ilsa, so we must learn theirs,” he told her. She threw herself into her studies, forsaking the nightlife of St. Michel for the hard work of Russian grammar and the rewards of being able to read Tolstoy in the original. She would have time later for celebration, she reasoned. Plenty of time.

  Then, on the first of May 1939, she met Victor Laszlo.

  “Get dressed, Ilsa!” said Angelique Casselle, her best friend, diving into Ilsa's closet, coming up with her best dress, and tossing it at her as she pored over a textbook. “You can't stay in your room studying forever. Do you want to die an old maid?”

  “But, the examination,” protested Ilsa.

  Angelique put her lips together and blew, a typically French gesture of disparagement. “Bah!” she said. “You already speak Russian better than Stalin. What more do you want? Come on! There's somebody I want you to meet.”

  Ilsa would never forget the address: 150, boulevard St.Germain. She had stopped at the open-air market that lined both sides of the rue du Seine and bought some fresh cheese and a bottle of Bordeaux to bring as presents. When she pressed the buzzer of the flat, the door was opened by the handsomest man she had ever seen, a man who greeted her with continental elegance in perfect French.

  “Miss Ilsa Lund, I believe,” he said, kissing her hand. “My name is Victor Laszlo.” His eyes met hers. “Miss Casselle told me you were the most beautiful girl in Paris. She lied. You are the most beautiful woman in all Europe.”

  Ilsa was astonished. Everybody in Paris knew Victor Laszlo, the Czech patriot who, before the Munich Pact of 1938, had so resolutely opposed any accommodation with the Nazis in his daily newspaper,Pravo. Laszlo had fearlessly exposed the Nazis’ record of brutality, redoubling his efforts after the Sudetenland was handed over to Germany. When Hitler annexed Bohemia and Moravia on March 15, 1939, Laszlo became a wanted man. He went underground for a time, continuing to publish. Finally, when the situation became too dangerous, he fled to Paris, where he joined the Czech government-in-exile and continued his opposition.

  From that moment on, they were nearly inseparable. Victor fell in love not only with Lisa's beauty, but with her intelligence and strength; he saw in her a partner in his grand crusade. For Ilsa, Laszlo opened up a whole world of knowledge and thoughts and ideals, and she looked up to him and worshiped him with a feeling she supposed was love. They worked together feverishly, not for themselves, but on behalf of all the captive peoples of Europe.

  Swept away by his selfless dedication, Ilsa Lund secretly married Victor Laszlo in June 1939. Not even their closest friends knew of their wedding.

  Despite her protestations, Victor returned to his homeland in July to carry the fight to the enemy. She told him it was too dangerous, but he wouldn't be dissuaded. “Ilsa, I must go,” he had told her. “How can I ask others to do what L myself will not?”

  The Gestapo, however, was waiting for him; a few days after arriving in Prague, Victor was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen in German-occupied Austria. A short while later he was reported dead, shot while trying to escape.

  Ilsa was despondent. For a time, she considered returning home to Oslo but quickly decided against it. Victor would have wanted her to stay and carry on their work. Besides, her brief experience with the Underground had given her a taste of the game the men were playing, and she liked it. Even when the rumors of war grew too loud to ignore, even when Hitler's saber rattling started to shake foundations from Warsaw to Paris, she stayed in France. When, in September 1939 the Wehrmacht attacked Poland, she knew she had made the right decision.

  She did not worry about her family. Scandinavia was small and unthreatening. Aside from Swedish iron ore, it had nothing the Germans either needed or wanted. Letters from home gave no cause for alarm. Then in April 1940 the Germans attacked and conquered Norway. The King fled to London, and the letters from home suddenly stopped. When next she heard from her mother it was a month later, and the news was terrible indeed: her father was dead.

  Ilsa watched the city flash by her window as the taxi maneuvered northeast through the rainswept, twisting streets. To her eye, London's gray, imposing buildings were clumped along the carriageways like descendants of Stonehenge, silent, magisterial, and more than a little forbidding. On this day they matched her mood.

  London was nothing like either Oslo or Paris, she reflected. Her hometown was small and hilly, perched on the water's edge as if getting ready to cast its fishing nets into the sea at any moment. Oslo's houses were smaller than London's, less regimented, more neighborly. They were narrow, gabled, and made of wood. In the brief summer, they were ringed with greenery and bright flowers made all the more cheerful by their impermanence; sealed tight against the elements during the long, dark winter, the homes were warm and inviting. Paris straddled the Seine serenely, incorporating the river into its very conception of self, as if man, not God, had put the water there for the pleasure of the Parisians. Oslo was happy to let nature dominate; Paris was pleased to allow nature to participate.

  The Thames was London's lifeline to the sea, but unless you were a dockworker or an MP, you could go for days without encountering the river. The buildings were at once grander and less elegant than their French counterparts, and the city's inhabitants moved more purposefully. The rainy weather and the sooty fog often erased the sun, but London preferred to ignore the elements rather than accommodate or kowtow to them. The business of London was not business but power, and it was to the keeping of that power that the country had rededicated itself in this war. Did Hitler know what a formidable opponent he had in the British? She doubted he did.

  “Here, driver, here!” she cried as they turned into Myddleton Square in Islington. She threw a handful of coins at the cabby, leaped out, and rushed up the steps to her mother's flat, her heart beating furiously.

  Inghild Lund rose to answer the doorbell. She opened the heavy door and beheld the daughter she thought she might never see again.

  Before she could say anything, Ilsa threw her arms around her and the two women stood on the doorstep, hugging fiercely.

  “I can't believe it's you,” whispered Inghild through her tears of joy.

  “I’m here, Mama,” cried Ilsa, “I’m here.”

  They stayed locked together for longer than either of them knew, not caring about the passersby or the rain, until Inghild at last released her daughter. “Come inside and tell me what miracle has finally brought you back to me.”

  The little flat was homey and comfortable; though it was far from Norway, to Ilsa it sang of home. A picture of King Haakon VII hung on one of the walls, and on a small side table stood a photograph of Edvard and Inghild Lund, taken on their wedding day in 1912. How handsome her father was in his dress suit, his left arm around his new wife and a cigarette in his right hand. Ilsa half expected him to walk in the door any minute, fresh from a meeting with the King; it was impossible to believe that she would never see him again.

  Ilsa Lund had been born in Oslo on August 29, 1915, just ten years after Norway won independence from Sweden; Oslo was still called Christiania then. Ilsa's father, Edvard Lund, had been a member of parliament, the Storting, which had rejected the Swedish monarch, Oscar II, and established the modern Norwegian state. “To those who question the depth of our desire,” he had said in a fiery speech, “I reply: We are ready to prove it with the sacrifice of our lives and our homes—but never of our honor.” Ilsa's father was quickly elevated to the cabinet and there he remained until April 1940, when the Nazis appropriated Norway in the name of the Greater German Reich.

  Inghild had been able to take along only a few belongings when she was spirited to London al
ong with the King and the government-in-exile. Ilsa recognized them at once. A lace tablecloth that used to cover a heavy wooden table with thick carved legs, under which she liked to hide as a child. Some silverware. A few Persian rugs, one of which still bore the stains of a glass of milk she had thrown so long ago in a childish tantrum. A small wall clock that had been in her mother's family for generations. It ticked softly in a corner, every passing second a bitter reminder of the calamity that had befallen their homeland.

  No, that was no way to think, Ilsa told herself. Every tick was one moment closer to liberation and freedom for them all. Whatever role she could play in that liberation, she was ready.

  Inghild had been preparing some tea for herself, but now she added more water and left it to steep in the pot, to serve later. She produced some cookies, as mothers always will, and some schnapps, which mothers sometimes will.

  “I’ve been beside myself with worry about you,” Inghild told her daughter, her voice alive with relief and delight. “After the fall of France your letters suddenly stopped. The Underground were able to tell me you were alive, but little else. Over the next year or so, I got a few of your letters, smuggled in. From our agents, I knew you were in occupied France, but I didn't know where. When I learned that you were headed to Casablanca, I could not ask why, but at least I could do something about it.” She laughed. “And now here you are! How I wish your father could see you.”

  “So it was you who suggested I contact Berger!” exclaimed Ilsa. In this moment of exultation, she didn't want to think about her father; they would mourn him together later—after she had avenged him. “I might have known my mother would still be watching over me.”

  “Yes, my dear,” said Inghild. “I may be only one lone woman, but I can still fight for my country—and for my child. Each week I receive briefings from the King's new minister of defense. The government, it seems, values my advice, although for the life of me I don't know why.”

  Ilsa took her mother's still-youthful hand, the hand she remembered so well from her childhood. “You know why, Mother,” she said. “You and Father were always equal partners. He called you his other self, and he trusted you like none other. Everything he knew you knew, and our country was immeasurably the better for it.”

  Inghild's eyes clouded at the memory of Edvard Lund, but she shook it off, unwilling to let it intrude on her happiness. “The Defense Minister told me that Berger might possibly be able to produce a laissez-passer or letter of transit to get you out of Morocco, so I sent word for you to meet him in a cafÉ. I forget what it was called.”

  “Rick's CafÉ Americain,” said Ilsa. “In Casablanca, sooner or later, everybody comes to Rick's.”

  “Yes,” said her mother. “I am so happy that Berger was able to get you safely out of Casablanca. Ole was a good boy, but always so skittish. Who would have suspected he had such courage in him? You cannot always tell a hero by his looks.”

  Talk of home made Ilsa reminisce. If she closed her eyes, hearkened to the sound of her mother's voice, and inhaled the smells of her mother's kitchen, she could almost imagine herself back in Oslo.

  “Tell me of home, Mother,” Ilsa requested.

  Inghild smoothed her dress. “Some of us are here in London, of course,” she began. “Liv Olsen, who lived down the street, is with her husband, and Birgit Aasen—you remember Birgit, you used to play together when you were little—is living in America now. Bay Ridge, I think they call it.”

  “I remember her,” said Ilsa. “We used to walk down to the Parliament building and pretend we were the King's most important councilors.”

  “Someday you may be,” said Inghild. “We arrived in June of 1940, after the King saw that resistance to the Nazis would be futile, and that the government could fight on more effectively from London. Many more stayed behind, though, and even now are working day and night against the Germans. Do you remember Arne Bjørnov?”

  “Little Arne, who asked if he could take me to the picture show?” said Ilsa. “He was so nervous. He must have thought Father was going to bite his head off. I would have gone with him, too, if he hadn't run off like that, as though a ghost were chasing him. And all because Father asked him, ‘Young man, what are your intentions?’ He was only thirteen!”

  “That frightened little boy has grown up to be a very brave man, Ilsa,” said Inghild. “Thanks to Arne, the people have refused to cooperate with the edicts of the German commissioner Josef Terboven, and they simply ignore the proclamations of the Nasjonal Samling, which is the only legal political party. The traitor Quisling's establishment of martial law last September has only increased their will to resist, and the ranks of patriotic saboteurs and spies grow every day. The Germans are frustrated and furious, but what can they do? They can't kill us all—and to really conquer Norway, they would have to.”

  Ilsa was thrilled to hear about her friends; now it was time to tell her mother about her own activities. “Berger wasn't the one who helped us get the letters of transit, Mama. Another man got me—got us—out of Casablanca.”

  Inghild caught the change of mood in her daughter's voice. “Us?”

  “Yes, us,” admitted Ilsa. “For two years, I have been married to Victor Laszlo.”

  “Married!” exclaimed her mother, all other thoughts driven from her mind. “And to Victor Laszlo! All Europe knows and honors his name. This is wonderful news!” Inghild kissed her daughter, her heart bursting with pride; if only Edvard were here.

  “I could not tell you of our wedding in my letters,” continued Ilsa. “For his safety, and for mine, we have told no one. It was too dangerous—for both of us. But it was not Victor who got us out of Casablanca, either. Someone else did. Someone I need to talk to you about.”

  Ilsa paused, unsure how to begin. “Mother,” she began, “is it possible to love two men at once? Really love them, each of them, with your whole heart and your whole soul, as if your own life depended on their very existence? If it is, how do you choose? Must you choose?”

  Ilsa clasped her hands together tightly. She was sitting very close to her mother and felt even closer. “Is it possible when one is so very different from the other?” she went on. “When one appeals to the best side of your nature, and the other appeals to the very core of your nature itself?”

  She sat expectantly, dreading and desiring the answer; not knowing what she wanted to hear.

  Inghild considered her words carefully. If she was surprised to learn of her daughter's marriage and then, hard on its heels, of her dilemma, she did not let on. “Why don't you tell me about him, Ilsa?” she said.

  This was the speech she had been rehearsing in the taxi, only she hadn't known it then. “His name is Richard,” she replied. “Richard Blaine. He is an American from New York.”

  She went on to tell Inghild everything, starting with how she had met Victor. About their brief life together in Paris. About the report of his death. About how she met Rick.

  “I was in the Deux Magots one spring day, reading the newspapers. Talk of war was in the air. My newspaper got caught in a gust of wind. A man at the next table retrieved it for me before it blew into the street. ‘I believe this belongs to you, miss,’ he said in English. I thought he might be an American. He sat down at my table. I didn't invite him, but he did anyway. Then I knew he was an American. ‘The view is much better from here,’ he said, and ordered us both coffee in the worst French I ever heard. It made me laugh to hear him speak. ‘Which is funnier,’ he asked me, ‘my accent or my face?’ After that, how could I ask him to leave?”

  “When a man makes a woman laugh,” Inghild said, “it is the first step to winning her heart.”

  “My heart!” exclaimed Ilsa. “I thought it was gone, dead, along with Victor. I was alone, and very lonely. I didn't know what to do or where to go. I couldn't go home to Olso, not after …”

  “Not after Quisling handed our country over to the Germans,” supplied her mother.

  “Not after you had
left,” Ilsa corrected her. “Not after Father died.” Her voice trembled with barely suppressed grief. “He suggested dinner that night, at La Tour d'Argent. I said yes. It seemed safe. We dined. The next day we danced. We went for a drive in his motorcar, and sailed along the Seine. We visited his nightclub,La Belle Aurore. We watched the dawn come up together, and it was very beautiful.”

  “You fell in love,” said Inghild.

  “I fell in love,” Ilsa concurred. “Not with an idea this time, but with a man. Richard opened up for me a world I never knew existed, a world of romance and passion, and …”

  “The physical love between a man and a woman,” said Inghild.

  Ilsa nodded. “Rick brought me back to life. And then Victor came back from the dead.”

  “How?”

  Ilsa felt herself growing agitated and steeled herself. When an exhausted and emaciated Victor suddenly reappeared on that rainy, wrenching day in Paris in June 1940, their life together became little more than desperate camouflage and unending flight as the Gestapo hunted them the length and breadth of France. If it hadn't been for that brave Algerian fisherman, who had smuggled them in his sloop across the Mediterranean from Marseille to Algiers, hidden under a load of stinking fish … She shuddered at the memory.

  “The Germans were approaching,” she said. “Everybody knew it was only a matter of time before they took Paris. The Czech government-in-exile had removed itself to London. Richard didn't want to leave, although I begged him to. I knew he was not the unfeeling cynic he pretended to be. I knew he had fought against Mussolini in Ethiopia and against Franco in Spain. The Germans knew his record, too; if he stayed, he would certainly be arrested. I couldn't let that happen to another man in my life. He wouldn't go without me, though. We decided to flee, together.”

  “But you didn't.”

  “I couldn't,” said Ilsa, casting her eyes down. “The day before we were to leave for Marseille, I got word that Victor was still alive, hiding in a boxcar on the outskirts of Paris. He was ill and needed me. Oh, Mother, how could I not go to him? He was my husband.”