In This Hospitable Land
Page 2
Relief workers shouted encouragement to each other and called down into the still-smoldering wreckage, seeking an answering cry. Then their shouting stopped.
André watched fearfully as several men cautiously shifted masonry to lift out a form and lay it gently on the adjacent pavement. The victim’s grime-covered limbs had gone gray and were hideously distorted by death. The rescuers gazed wordlessly as the lifeless body grew cold. The poor man’s hair, oiled and precisely parted down the middle mere minutes before, was now rudely, almost clownishly, disarranged. His formerly immaculate white shirt was stained bright red with blood still seeping from the wound.
Glancing up and away from death, André saw that the façade’s fall had left four stories of private rooms open to the sky. Disturbed furniture and sad-looking personal possessions jumbled by the force of the bomb’s direct hit were plainly, painfully public.
On the third floor, the staring eyes of an elderly baldheaded man in an old-fashioned armchair seemed to take in the haphazard devastation casually. Why had he failed to evacuate the premises as all citizens had been instructed to do in the event of an air raid?
It doesn’t matter anymore, André thought gloomily. The old man’s eerie immobility stated clearly that he too was dead.
At last the street car rounded the corner onto the Avenue Louise. Hastening up its steps André was amazed that the public transport was still running as if the bombing were a temporary inconvenience rather than a death-dealing portent of still more horror to come. As André took a seat, a surge of thoughts and feelings washed over him as if a moment’s relaxation allowed the flood to breach some protective dam.
Gazing out the window, traffic was lighter than usual but cars still honked as street-corner crowds of stunned, disbelieving Belgians gathered as if together they could dispel the attack’s implications. Unusually large numbers of army trucks, their military horns blaring relentlessly, raced along the broad avenues connecting Brussels’s neighborhoods. Ambulances also appeared more frequently than ordinarily, their singsong sirens sounding altered since the previous day—more urgent and desperate. Fat columns of smoke rose in the distance, filtering into the gray-orange haze blanketing the city as munitions stored in bombed armories continued to explode.
“But Belgium is neutral!” one of André’s fellow streetcar passengers lamented.
How naive that sounded. How could anyone believe the government’s protestations of neutrality would protect Belgium any more today than they had during the “war to end all wars,” when the country had been occupied? Hadn’t these people noticed the military going into full alert one month earlier? No. They believed what they wanted to believe.
André had taken no more comfort from the mobilization than from official assurances that Fort Eben-Emael was impregnable and would keep the Germans east of the great waterways of the Meuse River and the Albert Canal—natural lines of defense against invading foot soldiers. Self-satisfied bureaucrats and the parroting press insisted that the capital and the rest of Belgium would be safe. André knew better.
Listening to others state that Luxembourg and Holland had also been invaded that morning, André clenched his teeth convulsively. So the Germans had learned from their mistakes. In the last war they had left the Dutch to their own devices, closing off a major avenue for attack and escape. Not this time. This time the Sauverins wouldn’t be able to seek safe haven as they had before, in the Netherlands.
André could only suppose that the misery of the last war was about to happen again, except this time it would be infinitely worse, especially for Jews, practicing or not. Anti-Semitism had played no part in the previous German hostilities. Now it seemed central, with an evil and unjust intensity.
Reaching with his long, tapered fingers, André gently removed his plain, round, horn-rimmed glasses and rubbed his clear gray eyes. Though secular he was still part of a large Jewish family, a major concern that gnawed at his subconscious and occasionally surfaced, as now when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the tram’s window.
With his soft unmarked hand he felt along an aquiline nose distinguished by just the hint of a Roman bump. Ordinarily that bump didn’t bother him in the slightest, but today he couldn’t help wondering, Do others see it as Jewish? Though he had never done anything to obscure his heritage he had never done anything to call attention to it either. Could its concealment possibly prove a matter of life or death?
The tram passed the German embassy and André once more saw, parked in the compound, trucks marked “Bayer” and “Blaupunkt.” He had first taken note of them immediately after April’s attacks on Denmark and Norway, but did not understand then why the sight of the vehicles had disquieted him. Now he realized they might not have been delivering aspirin and radios. They may have contained war materials—the first wave of the German invasion.
As he approached his stop, André rose and worked his way through the cluster of passengers. Oh, how he wished he could be with the rest of his family on this frightening morning! At least Alex was there to care for and comfort their two wives, four children, and aging parents. Alighting on the sidewalk André saw people scurrying to shops, work, and school. Most were dressed and behaving as they customarily would. The university was open for education, providing reassurance and reminding him he had to get to class. As he entered through the great gates, André knew he ought to make contact with his family soon. The news of the Brussels bombing must have reached Le Coq by then. But he had no time now. He would call later if the telephone service hadn’t been disrupted.
Inside the university, professors and students proceeded at a fevered pace. André hastened to his laboratory-classroom, peered through the door’s small glass pane, and was gratified to find his students hard at work. As he stepped inside they stopped talking and eyed him unnervingly. Ritualistically, he slipped out of his suit jacket and into his long white lab coat.
Purpose and routine soothed him. As always, he marveled at the institution he had loved since his own student days and now as an assistant professor and head of the analytical chemistry laboratory at the university that had educated him. He was proud to have long embraced and been nourished by the Free University’s tradition of unfettered intellectual pursuit, which dated back to its founding in 1834, three years after the nation’s birth. Breaking with the educational paradigm of Belgium’s older Catholic colleges, the Free University had played a significant role in the development of one of Europe’s first democratic states, a parliamentary monarchy in which freedom both of expression and religion reigned.
Now focusing on his students, André realized fewer were in attendance than on most Fridays even after the general mobilization of April, when so many of the younger faculty members and older undergraduates had been called up for active duty. Only a half-dozen were present today where recently there had been twice as many.
“Monsieur le professeur Sauverin?” his best student asked.
“Hmn?”
“What are we to do?”
Suddenly the rules of chemistry seemed less important than the rules of war. Everything André could teach these fine young people would pale before the painful education they were about to receive in human frailty and cruelty.
From them he learned the university had become a vast network of information and misinformation, with students slipping in and out to listen to radio broadcasts and report back what they heard. His class asked: would Fort Eben-Emael hold? Was the army actually fighting? Where was the king? What was happening in France?
“Be careful of rumors,” André counseled calmly, taking on a role different than chemistry professor. “Honor our school’s heritage of free but responsible inquiry. As scientists it’s our job to determine facts and only then to come to conclusions and generate further verifiable hypotheses. History should be treated as carefully and so should current events.”
“Professor Sauverin,” a female student cried plaintively, “that doesn’t tell us what to do!”
Eyes ranging over this small, rapt group, André wondered, very much against his will, how many of the young men in front of him would soon be drafted and then dead. He fell silent, providing an opening for still more questions: would classes be dismissed early today, perhaps for the summer? Would the rector implement emergency plans?
“Why don’t we break for lunch?” André suggested, as much at a loss as they. “I’ll find out what I can.”
Following his students into the corridor, he saw the stately figure of department chair Alexandre Pinkus hurry past. André called his name. Only a few years older than himself, Pinkus had mentored André at the university and had smoothed the way for his teaching career.
Now Pinkus waved him off, late for an emergency meeting with the rector.
Having dined and finally drained a cup of coffee in the faculty lounge, André found Pinkus in his cramped office, hunched over a desk covered with teetering stacks of books and papers. Corpulent and balding, with a small, well-trimmed black moustache lining his upper lip and underlining his prominent nose, Alexandre Pinkus—whom André always addressed formally as Professor or Dr. Pinkus, the only manner appropriate and acceptable at such an august institution—was always as neatly and properly dressed as André. Permanently sporting a pince-nez that enhanced his somewhat affected air of importance and prestige, Pinkus, a prodigy, had risen steadily to tenured rank as head of the chemistry department, quickly settling into the comfortable life of an academic. A fine scholar and generous educator, he had failed to fulfill his early promise by banking the fires of his intellectual passion. A lifelong bachelor, he had banked all his other passions too. An openly observant Jew, the department chair had remained shockingly unperturbed by Hitler’s ever-increasing oppression of Jews and opponents of the Nazi party and its fascist ideology, not to mention the Führer’s now-demonstrated propensity for overrunning borders in pursuit of German territorial restitution and expansion.
But Professor Pinkus wasn’t alone in this. In the face of lootings, beatings, burnings, and murders, many of André’s scientific peers in Germany had remained mute. True, hundreds if not thousands of professors and scientists, particularly Jews, had escaped the pressing Nazi threat for less–immediately endangered countries like France, England, America, and even Belgium, though Belgium was usually just a stopover. But the vast majority had remained without protest. And at the Free University…
Ever since the signing of the Munich Accords, André had been deeply troubled by the timidity with which the faculty had greeted the advancement of Nazism. What happened across Belgium’s eastern border, they had declared, was “their problem.” Even the invasion of Poland had not roused them or the Belgian people to action any more than it had truly roused the British and the French. They had honored their mutual defense pact with the Poles by declaring war on Germany, yes, but whose ineffectual troop maneuvers had thus far lent legitimacy only to the term most often used to describe that war: “phony.”
Where was Belgian opposition? Was the university’s glorious, much-ballyhooed ideal of free debate phony too? It was all too reminiscent of the university André had returned to, after his army service, from the Ruhr Valley: frightfully conservative and closed-minded. Then, he at age twenty-seven had founded Le Cercle du Libre Examen—the Circle for Free Debate—an important vehicle for undergraduate inquiry that eventually reawakened the professors. Now, however, the faculty had once more sunk, like their counterparts in the German universities, into silence.
“Come in, come in, monsieur le professeur Sauverin,” the department chair called, rising. “How fare your students?”
“As well as they can under the circumstances, Professor Pinkus.”
“Yes, yes,” Pinkus replied halfheartedly, removing a snappy red handkerchief from the breast pocket of his gray herringbone suit jacket and dabbing at the droplets of sweat appearing on his brow. “I understand. But I have faith that life in Brussels will not prove as difficult as I know you expect. You plan to leave, but where would a man as set in his ways as I am go? And if everyone readied themselves to flee like you, where would Belgium be? What would happen to our dear university? What about our responsibilities?”
“As long as there is a free Belgium and a Free University,” André informed his superior, “this is where you will find me. But once freedom is gone I shall be gone too. With my family.”
“I spoke to the rector,” Pinkus said, blinking rapidly, his watery blue eyes magnified disturbingly by his pince-nez. “Were I you I would assume the university will remain in session until further notice.”
“What about my students?” André asked, resuming his polite tone. “It would be a kindness to allow them to return to their families.”
“As you see fit, professor,” Pinkus said neutrally, turning back to his work.
André might have felt offended but understood there were far larger forces affecting Alexandre Pinkus than himself.
Dismissing his class, André told them he expected to see them back as usual the next day. Then he exchanged his lab coat for his suit jacket and also left the university.
The streets were more chaotic than before. Initially stunned, the populace was now panicked. André wasn’t, yet he decided to return to Le Coq even though he usually didn’t until after classes Saturday. But this was no ordinary day. He had no idea whether the trains were running but was determined to try to catch one.
Hurrying to the streetcar stop, clambering aboard the arriving tram and struggling toward one of the last open seats, André realized he had forgotten to phone his family. Nothing he could do about that now. Besides, the only way his family would be fully reassured of his well-being would be to see for themselves that he was safe.
Involuntarily he recalled the harsh if well-intended words of an old family friend who had fled for America in September, when the Sauverins had moved to Le Coq: “Don’t kid yourself, André. The Belgian constitution forbids government archives from hinting at your ‘historical affiliation,’ but the Nazis will still be able to do their dirty work. It’s your neighbors you must worry about. They might prove deadly when the Brownshirts come with questions and demands. You believe they respect and even love you. Maybe that’s so. But people say and do terrible things if they believe betraying others will keep them safe.”
Heading toward the Gare du Midi the crowded streetcar passed through the city’s heart, where André was astounded to see a steady stream of refugees from the east, identifiable by the possessions on their backs. How had these unfortunates arrived in the capital so soon after the attack? How quickly might the Brussels André knew fade away as if a dream? Would Saint-Michel protect Brussels against the Nazi devil and his bombs? Or would the Grand Place be reduced to rubble as had happened before? And would this be the end of Mannekin Pis? If only that fine famed infant could urinate once more, putting out the flames threatening to engulf the world.
At the ever-impressive train terminal André felt himself pulled into the great swirling crowd and the turmoil of a rapidly changing situation. Hundreds of men and women bustled about frantically, none really knowing what was going on. Even government officials seemed uncertain what was happening, as overwhelmed as everyone else by the sudden German onslaught.
Some trains were still running. André battled the crowds, trying to see if his regular train to the towns along the North Sea was listed on the big board of arrivals and departures. His seaward train confirmed, André struggled out onto the crowded platform past excited newsboys waving their newspapers overhead with the single headline, WAR!
The steam engine puffed smoke insistently from its shiny black stack, the smoke diffusing as it drifted up against the roof of the great shed. The sky shone beyond, sunlight still bright against the darkening shadows of the spires and taller buildings of the centr
al city. The deep green of the train’s four carriages, new after the Great War but rather worn now, and the gold lettering on them, faded but clean, proffered a reassuring familiarity.
Confirming the imminent departure for Ostend, the conductor stood by the last carriage, checking his pocket watch against the large clock above the station waiting room, his whistle at the ready. André clambered up the several steep black steel steps of the third car, pushed open the heavy metal door, and hastened to one of the few available seats of plush green velvet in the center—a window seat, its view obscured by streaks of soot on the outside, dried after trailing down to the sill during a recent rain.
A rush of last-minute passengers crammed in as the conductor blew his departure-signaling blast, followed by a shrill piping from the engine. The car jerked and latecomers stumbled as the power of the steam thrusting into the pressure cylinders drove the train out of the station and across a switch, onto the rail line leading north and west, toward Alost.
Suddenly André remembered that the next day was his sister-in-law’s twenty-eighth birthday. He had meant to get her a present before returning to Le Coq, but perhaps, given the situation, Geneviève would understand and forgive.
Staring out the dirty window André could discern through the darkening sky smoke still rising from distant installations bombed many hours earlier. Was it possible this was still the same impossible day?
At each station as many got on as off, with seated passengers shouting for the newcomers to reveal the latest, though they had nothing better than new rumors to add to the incessant ill-informed chatter about German attacks. André did his best to block out the noise, deep in his own thoughts as he watched automobiles racing along the roads. He peered over at the villages the train passed through, the lights coming on in the cozy-looking homes. It all seemed so normal, a Friday evening like any other. Yet he imagined the fevered, frantic fighting taking place in the eastern part of the country.