The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  It was past spring, really. Just plain summer. Blackford hadn’t bothered to put on his light green poplin jacket, matching his trousers. He simply slung it over his shoulder, his yellow tie loosened, his thought turning, for the thousandth time, to his failure to grasp exactly what were the crystallizing forces. Exactly what would come next? He was experienced enough to know that the crunch was not far away: this matter of the sharpened instinct. Besides which, on the weekend’s visit with Rufus in London, he had seen his old mentor more put off, by the awful impalpability of the problem, than ever before—all those other crises having involved a deadline in part of their own initiative, or a plan over which they had effective control. This time they had no such control, none. It was terminally discouraging to remind himself that his mission was to find out what Ulbricht intended to do but that in all probability Ulbricht did not know what he intended to do, because Khrushchev had not decided what he would permit him to do. Though Khrushchev’s post-Vienna rhetoric was more strident than ever, and the inside word was that the old pro had taken Kennedy good and proper. Rufus hadn’t wanted to talk about that.

  Rufus did want to know everything Blackford was able to tell him about the Bruderschaft and its operations. Every day it became clearer that if there was going on, in East Germany, something that could be called a resistance movement, Henri Tod had it in hand. Henri Tod. A difficult man to know, about whose capacity for personal warmth Blackford knew only abstractly, not as an intimate.

  There was no doubting that Tod felt deeply. And on one reflective occasion he had, without giving out the story, let alone the details, alluded to “his” nightmare. In fact Blackford knew the story: Rufus had got it from the widow of Henri’s old guardian in London, the story about Henri’s spilling the beans to another schoolboy—which story had got to the Gestapo, it was assumed, there being no other explanation for the sudden detection of the Wurmbrands and Clementa’s hideout in Tolk. Blackford doubted he would ever be told the story by Henri himself. If ever that were to happen, he would deem it a form of initiation into the very closest company Henri Tod kept. But Henri’s emotional life was clearly imploded into that endless nightmare of self-reproach—Blackford had discussed the question with Rufus—at once the fountain of Henri’s personal melancholy and the dynamic cause of his agitated motivation, as if he intended to live out his life in hectic expiation for what he had done.

  It was nearly an hour before Blackford arrived at the apartment house, on Rheinstrasse. He didn’t know exactly what he would do that evening. He felt restless, felt like talking to someone as different from Rodino as he could find. Though not, he acknowledged, necessarily different from some of the ladies who, in the past, had dealt with Rodino. What were the nurses like? he wondered.

  He climbed the two sets of stairs to the entrance of his “uncle’s” flat. He had to admit it, the CIA was the most ingenious foster-parent finder in the history of hospitality. He could not count the uncles, aunts, cousins, stepfathers whose apartments, conveniently vacated because they had gone on extended vacations, had accommodatingly been turned over to him in the past ten years, no paperwork to be performed, not even any letters to be sent, no dunning landlords. “Dear Uncle Jack: It’s warm in Berlin. What a pity you had to go to the Antarctic? On the other hand, you were always a little queer for igloos. Love, Blacky.” Ah well.

  Blackford, unlike Rufus, was not given to rigorous self-scheduling. He managed to keep trim not by daily exercise, but because something within him, every three or four days, would begin to creak, and he would know it was time to visit the gymnasium or, if none such was about, to take his exercise wherever he might. He never knew exactly what book he was going to read next, but knew that when he was finished with his current book, the next one would be right there, intuitively situated in an erratic but ultimately dependable assembly line. He had, however, developed such habits as are inculcated in deep-cover agents. He never made entirely casual appointments, he routinely traveled by different routes, he was careful what he said over which telephone, that sort of thing.

  But one or two habits of a personal kind he did have, and one of these was, almost immediately on coming home to his apartment, whether in the late afternoon or at night, to walk into the bathroom, open the medicine-cabinet door, and reach for his toothbrush: he had got into the habit for some reason of brushing his teeth after getting home from work. This afternoon, stuck cockily inside his glass, the toothbrush protruding from either end of the sealed envelope was—a letter. Addressed, simply: “Mr. Oakes.”

  Oakes was registered, as the inhabitant of his uncle’s apartment, as John Jerome, with documents to match. His little apartment was in the Consolidated Insurance Building, subleased by Lloyd’s, where independent insurance agents wrote policies, conducted investigations, and made assessments, and a few kept living quarters. His cover had been done with some care.

  Now he reacted professionally. Without withdrawing the letter, he let himself carefully out of the apartment. He walked not down, but up the stairs, to the top level, the fifth floor, which accommodated a single tiny room under the gabled roof. Designed for a maid, or a grandmother, or a few trunks. He took the key from his ring, opened the door, and went to a dusty telephone. He dialed a number. He let it ring exactly three times, then hung up. The requisite message was transmitted, and specified contingency arrangements were triggered.

  Next he went to the cobwebby little window of the room, and peered out over the street. He did this for a full half hour, only then letting himself out the door. He walked down not into his own apartment on the third floor, but all the way down, and out the principal door. At the corner was a restaurant-bar. He stopped and, at the counter, ordered a beer. While it was being fetched up he went to the telephone and rang a different number, which answered instantly. He said, “Anything for Jerome?” A voice answered, “Nothing spotted in the area. You are under friendly observation front and rear. The usual signals will apply.” He returned to the bar, drank half the beer, left change, bought a newspaper, and went back to his apartment. Inside, he walked to the bathroom and carefully examined the medicine cabinet before withdrawing the letter. He sat down on the toilet and opened the envelope, careful not to mutilate it. The letter was typewritten:

  “Dear Mr. Oakes:

  “I am a very reasonable man, you will discover. And I like very much to expedite, so to speak, the desires of different parties. What I have to offer you and Henri is Clementa Tod. Yes, she is alive. I enclose a picture of her, on the back of which she has penned a note to her brother. She advises me that no further proof of her survival is necessary. I am willing to do what I can to contrive her liberation. But it will be very expensive, in every sense of the word. You are deputized to act as intermediary between me, repeat me, and Clementa on the one hand, and her brother on the other. If you wish to pursue this discussion, bring fifty thousand marks (no tricks, please: Clementa would be terminally disappointed, and other important plans would be frustrated). Come alone with the money to East Berlin to Arnswalder Platz at the corner of Pasteur and Hans-Otto-Strasse at 1605 hours on Thursday, day after tomorrow, and begin walking northwest, on the sidewalk, as close as you can to the curb. You will accept the offer of a ride from the person who, from the car, addresses you as ‘Mr. Jerome.’ It would be, I repeat, a most awful pity if these arrangements were embarrassed. The sum of money is not negotiable, so be so good as not to appear with a lesser amount. Yours truly,”

  The letter was signed, simply, “F.”

  The color photograph was of a girl severely garbed in a gray pants suit. Her expression was serious, her figure trim, her eyes downcast. She was very beautiful. Blackford turned the photograph around, and read in German, “I long to see Your Majesty.” It was signed, “C.”

  10

  It seemed to the President to be over only moments after it had begun, though he knew that, before the century was finished, historians would probably write whole books about the events that began
on May 30, 1961, and ended on June 6. Interesting point: end of the century. There was a sense in which the question whether the century would end was affected by the events of that week. Curious question: What happens to a century if there is no one around to record its passage? There was all that business Professor Strausshaven used to talk about—was it Hume? Berkeley? One of those things-don’t-exist-unless-you-can-feel-them types. Empiricists. Right. The ones who said that a tree in the forest that falls makes no noise unless someone is there to hear it. Neat point. Provided you have an appetite for neat points of that sort. Not the kind of thing he would discuss with Paul Butler the next time they had a conversation about the electoral vote in Wisconsin. Though come to think of it, he’d have a point that might interest old Paul, who was something of an intellectual in his own politically obsessed way. A vote is, or is not, a vote if the voter doesn’t actually record that vote? Isn’t that related in some way to the business of the tree and the forest? I mean, Mrs. Jones decides to vote for Kennedy but doesn’t get around to doing so. Is her decision to vote for Kennedy the philosophically interesting event, or is it her actual appearance at the polls in order to execute her decisions? Isn’t that what Hume was talking about, so to speak? Or was it Berkeley? … Anyway, it had been one hell of a week. The arrival in Paris was some spectacle! Charles de Gaulle was obviously curious to know something about me, and no doubt had read everything he could lay his hands on. Not quite everything, I hope. On the other hand, I did homework also, read through De Gaulle’s war memoirs. Pretty powerful stuff, gave you an idea of the man’s steel. But not a clear picture, the one that emerges. On the one hand he acted, and wrote, as though France would go on forever. On the other hand there was, here and there, an apocalyptic turn of mind sort of thing: Do it our way or, it doesn’t matter what happens, the world will burn up. Catholic stuff, in a way. De G. was certainly one of those. I mean, one of us. Not an uninteresting political point, that one. Because if life on earth is merely a transitory business, then it isn’t all that important, though God knows I hope I don’t have to work as hard to get into heaven as I did to get into the White House. On the other hand it occurs to me that in order to get to place A, as Walt Rostow would put it, I’m going to have to satisfy a lot of people in not quite the same way that I satisfied the people who took me to place B, right? Well, that’s merely a politically interesting point. How exactly? Well, goddam it, if Charles de Gaulle, who is nearly a hundred years old or whatever, feels that we can just give Khrushchev an atomic ultimatum, it may just be that his judgment is affected by the Catholic business. I mean, the Christian business. Important point, that; I got hell from Bobby when I slurred it in my speech early on in the campaign to the seminary people. And sure enough, De Gaulle was that way. Just as Ted Sorensen had warned he would be. De Gaulle wants me to make no concessions whatever in the matter of East Germany and Berlin. Needless to say, none on the matter of the right of our own access to Berlin, but none, either, on the right of access to different parts of Berlin by Berliners. Sure, neat. But then he would spring odd things. For instance, he told me late that afternoon in that—God, that’s a fancy office of his (I’m sorry Jackie saw it: the Oval Office will never again quite do)—when we were discussing NATO, and he was off on one of his metaphysical binges. He’s getting ready to pull out of NATO and we all know this. But he’s not really pulling out of NATO, says the wily old bird, because we have to distinguish between NATO the alliance, which he has no intention whatsoever of pulling away from, and NATO the organization. And this organization, says the general, is really Made in U.S.A., patent pending, and this isn’t quite right. And so he says to me—not just the usual thing, about how Europeans could never feel absolutely sure that an American President would push the nuclear button to defend Europe if the result would be that the Russians would devastate American cities. He says to me, “M. President”—I wonder if even Mrs. de Gaulle calls him Charles?—“please understand that I am not reproaching you. I would not, if our roles were exchanged, guarantee you on my honor that I would be prepared to sacrifice every American city in order to defend the cities of Europe.” Not all that easy to answer, so I said the usual things about an alliance being an alliance, and the son of a bitch reminded me that the language of NATO authorizes any member of NATO, having interpreted an assault on one member as an assault on all members, to retaliate militarily as that nation “deems necessary.” That means, theoretically, we might not deem it necessary to retaliate militarily at all. Maybe we’d cut down that month’s shipment of Pepsi-Cola, and declare war on Don Kendall. Then he says to me—as a matter of fact, that was on Wednesday at the lunch in the palace, when Jackie made such a hit. Good old Jackie. God knows what in French history she was speaking to God about at the lunch, but suddenly he turned to me, and he was radiant, and he said, Do you realize that the conversations your wife has had with me are on the order of my wife chatting with you about Henry Clay? I smiled. Appreciatively, you bet. Managed a wink at Jackie. Thank God Mrs. de Gaulle wasn’t trained to ask me my views of Henry Clay, since the only thing I could remember about him offhand was that he was the Great Compromiser. Wish the Great Compromiser had been with us in France. Though he’d have been especially useful at Vienna … Oh yes, and then—last words, practically—after that final meeting he says to me, “M. President, stand fast when they tell you they want to change the status of Berlin. That is the most useful thing you can do for the world. And for world peace.” All these general instructions and admonishments I get. I was a little pissed off at Averell Harriman charging into the Versailles party, though he’d have been invited if I had thought to send in his name. But what he said was, “Jack, do what pleases you. Relax. Enjoy yourself. Trust your own instincts.” He’s about the only one left who calls me “Jack.” But then I hear he calls Her Britannic Majesty “Liz.” Maybe he’ll bring us together again one of these days. “Liz? You know Jack? Of course.” What the hell, confusing. But you leave De Gaulle with an eerie kind of serenity, maybe related to that religious business. Arthur reminded me that when De G met with Khrushchev in March a year ago and K was going on and on about how awful wars are, De G said to him that if he didn’t want war, then he shouldn’t start one. Apparently that really dried K up. On the other hand, when De G says something he means to be the last word on some discussion, his mind visibly walks away from the subject, and you have the feeling that if his last words were: Would you like the Venus de Milo for Christmas? and he intended that to shut off discussion, he wouldn’t even hear you when you said no. Khrushchev would probably say no, the son of a bitch. Yeah, he would, I bet, though he’d accept the Venus de Milo if one of his spies stole it for him. Bastard.

  11

  At Auschwitz, by the time Clementa got there in late January of 1945, the assembly line was running with feverish haste. The commandant had said he would settle for nothing less than one thousand “eliminations” per day, notwithstanding that the routine had been for just under five hundred. This meant all the obvious things—day and night sessions, lengthened duty hours, a general compression of the horror. But it also meant that the victims did not have the time to atrophy that their predecessors had, whose “elimination” often came only after a month or two or even three of near starvation. So it was that Clementa, on the day her execution was aborted by the Russian infantry division, though thinner than normal, had only the physical stress of one week’s separation from her pastoral routine with the Wurmbrands at Tolk. Her complexion was healthy, her frame rounded. All the haggardness was concentrated in her eyes, which denoted that she had not only lost weight, she had lost all contact with reality. She went from the place in line which one hour earlier had been moving toward the gas chambers—a line whose links instantly dispersed when the commotion came—to another line outside the Revolutionary People’s Club, designated as such within one hour after every German in the vicinity of the building, used for recreational purposes by the authorities who had administered the camp, had be
en either shot or stuffed into railroad cars headed for slower deaths. Clementa was separated from her dazed, and elated, companions and, with a half-dozen other girls, one or two younger, the others in their early twenties, was taken to a dormitory, and in the course of the evening raped a dozen times. Her body reacted spastically to the pain and the bullying, but she was for the most part without facial expression of any kind.

  In eight days she had seen her foster parents executed without warning, been herded into a car and driven silently to Hamburg, then into a railroad car jammed with several hundred shivering human beings, some half her age, some four times her age, none of whom she knew; from them she vaguely learned that they were headed for a death camp. The thought of ceasing to live was the only bright prospect that came to mind, and so she carried out the orders given to her with exemplary docility, and when she was nudged by the old lady who had sobbed it seemed every moment of the five days and nights in the camp, to be told that this was the day designated for the extermination of everyone in that barracks, that the gruesome execution by gas would happen that very afternoon, Clementa felt nothing at all. And then, moments after the wailing company had lined up for their last farewell, there were the scattered shots, the sudden disorder, the flight of the guards, the blare of the radio, the howls from the prisoners. Clementa merely stood, as though commanded to stay in line, outside her barracks, head pointed to the right, toward the gas chamber one kilometer distant.

  She had stood alone almost two hours when a Russian soldier grabbed her arm and led her to an improvised processing center at which the captain, looking up, asked her her name, her age, and where she had come from. She replied to none of these questions, whereupon the captain designated her for officer entertainment, in which capacity she proceeded to serve for the balance of that month, before being shipped first to an interrogation center, where she was pronounced dazed beyond the capacity of conventional therapy to extricate her, and then on to Vorkuta, a Soviet prison camp, where she was given menial work to perform.