In This Hospitable Land

by Jr. Lynmar Brock

  The train pulled out of Alost, a stop André hardly noticed, and continued northwest toward Ghent. The land exuded a peaceful serenity, flat and green, with small farmhouses of weathered brick and red-tile roofs built alongside ditches cut into the rich, dark soil to drain water from the fields. Willow trees planted along the water courses, their tops cut off to allow the new growth to spring out from strong brown trunks as the weather warmed, stood thick and mottled with vertical ridges replicating, in nature’s way, the classic columns of the Greeks and Romans. The sturdy, browsing Charleroi cattle seemed so placid.

  Then André recalled again the December day of his American odyssey when, on a commuter train departing New York’s Pennsylvania Station for Princeton, New Jersey, he had heard a gentleman ask politely in English as heavily accented as his own, “Is this seat taken?”

  Looking up André had been dumbfounded to see that wild gray hair framing the world’s most famous face, Albert Einstein. André had previously run into the epochal figure at one of the famed Solvay conferences and had been profoundly affected watching the great man in action. That conference had brought André into direct contact with virtually all of the most important scientific minds of his intellectually tumultuous time, but none had impressed him as much as Einstein.

  And on the train in 1930? Incredibly, Einstein too was there to attend that night’s celebratory dinner at the brand-new Institute for Advanced Study.

  On the train in 1940 the Belgian conductor announced Bruges as the next stop. André was very far away, inside his memories.

  “Herr Einstein,” André had said humbly, switching to German, which was more comfortable for them both than English. “You wouldn’t remember me but…”

  “Of course I remember you! I refuse to forget you!”

  “I was at the Solvay conference when you debated Bohr…”

  “In October?”

  “No, the fifth Solvay. Three years ago.”

  Einstein chuckled, his devilish eyes sparkling with joy. “You would have loved it this time. I really gave it to Bohr. One of my thought experiments stumped him, poor man. Which strengthened my faith that the theories of quantum mechanics are far from conclusive…”

  “I wish I could have been there.”

  “But you had important work to do at the Research Foundation, no?”

  “You know I’m a fellow there?”

  “You think I would accept an invitation to this dinner without doing background research on guests of honor such as yourself?”

  “Guests of honor:” the phrase on Einstein’s lips had made André’s heart thump wildly. He couldn’t believe he deserved to be in such company as Einstein’s, let alone at the head of the table. And to find himself discoursing privately with the most influential scientist since Newton…

  Einstein had been neither stuffy nor proud. He had worn his greatness lightly and had seemed genuinely interested in the comparative youth he called “my dear colleague.”

  “All these ceremonies and honors,” Einstein had sighed, “are not for me. I always feel like a trained monkey in my tuxedo. Imagine a Jewish pacifist monkey: Hitler’s nightmare!”

  Though many details of this decade-old conversation had faded away, the substance remained vivid to André. In addition to discussing the latest scientific advances, André had been anxious to learn firsthand whether Einstein believed Hitler a threat to the world generally and to scientists like Einstein particularly.

  “You mean to a Jew?” Einstein had retorted chillingly with an odd, twisted smile on his face. He had taken the Nazi threat seriously from the first, having fled Berlin for Leiden in the Netherlands as soon as he had learned about the Beer Hall Putsch. Subsequently he had returned to Germany only reluctantly, because Max Planck had urged him to and because Berlin was still the center of modern physics.

  As the North Sea train entered the station in Bruges, André understood how Einstein had felt. Though he wasn’t yet sure what the next hour, let alone the next day, would bring, it pained him to leave behind his much-loved Brussels, one of the world’s great cities and arguably the best place for the pursuit of chemistry.

  Einstein and André had also spoken of their mutual devotion to pacifism. What Einstein had had to say about peaceful resistance to tyrants had been as much an encouragement to André as his scientific accomplishments. Einstein’s thoughts had seemed altogether consonant with the Peace Testimony of William Penn, which had had a formidable impact on André, reshaping his personal philosophy. André remained deeply interested in the Friends. But he had yet to meet a Quaker.

  After another blast of whistles the train moved slowly out of medieval Bruges, along the Boudewijn Canal, and past low fields surrounded by ditches. Simple single-storied whitewashed farmhouses, their roofs pitched to shed the constant rain, stood forlorn along narrow roads. André could barely make out the carefully kept green pastures blending into the dark of the indistinct horizon as the train jogged a little south and then swung wide to the west, beginning the half-hour leg leading to the end of the line at the coast.

  The train pulled into Ostend close to schedule. André rose reflexively and made his exhausted way onto the platform, then walked the short distance to the station for the tram that ran along the coast between the French and Dutch borders. It would be at least twenty minutes before he reached Le Coq. Yet seated almost alone on the electric transport he felt oddly at ease. Physically and emotionally drained, lulled by the tram’s rocking and clacking, André wondered whether Einstein hadn’t been right. Maybe André needed to consider rejoining the Belgian army to do battle with the Nazis.

  And maybe not. Though he felt too tired to be certain of anything it occurred to André that the moment when one’s ideals are most sorely tested is the moment one must cling to them most strongly.

  Three hours after leaving Brussels, André struggled uphill on foot from the Flemish-style tram station to reach the villa, his family, and rest.

  What worried him most now he had no intention of sharing with anyone, especially those he loved best. Recent arcane developments in the study of the elements had made an atomic bomb a distinct if highly theoretical possibility. André suspected Hitler already had his best scientific minds and technicians hard at work making that potential actual. Fascists were splitting the world. Physicists were splitting the atom. It was hard to guess which was more dangerous. But nothing could be more fateful than the two combined.

  Denise was standing by the door willing André’s return. When he finally walked up out of the gloom, she ran to him and pressed her face against his, holding him tight.

  “I’m home,” he said simply.

  “Thank goodness,” Denise whispered with deep emotion.

  She led him into the villa and through the gathered family. André greeted each in their special way. Then Denise guided him to their room where he collapsed gratefully onto the bed and instantly fell asleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LE COQ

  MAY 10, 1940

  Friday had started well for Denise as she rose to the cheerful sounds of children playing.

  Easing into the living room she marveled again at her surroundings. Compared to her previous homes this villa was cramped and threadbare, but with its low dunes and long smooth beach, Le Coq was a delightful retreat. At the height of summer Belgians arrived there in astonishing numbers to swim, sunbathe, and play ball. The rest of the year it was more desolate, but even in the continued cold of early May, Denise reveled in the resort’s stark, elemental nature.

  “Tea!” her eldest daughter, Ida, called out gleefully, abandoning her composition book and racing to the antique toy chest jammed into the less-than-commodious space. At five and a half Ida read constantly and worked hard at learning to write, frequently camping out in a corner of the couch, knees pulled up to brace her notebook as she traced and retraced her letters, the pale-pink tip of her tongue protruding in concentration. Ida’s younger sister Christel, who had turned two the previou
s Sunday, raced to join the sibling she idolized and adored. Small for her age, Christel shared the family’s wavy chestnut-colored hair, clear white skin, and glow of good health. Smiling her cherubic smile by her sister’s side, she clutched the well-hugged doll she took everywhere.

  Their cousins Katie and Philippe had come across from their villa next door a little earlier than usual. Katie, who would turn six the next week, brushed her soft dark hair with her ever-present hairbrush, avoiding the clips holding the longest strands behind her small, delicate ears. Adorable-looking fourteen-month-old Philippe, the only male Sauverin in the next generation, held his sister’s hand and clutched one of the miniature lead cars and trucks that absorbed him. They were wonderful children whose faults—hers to whine when she didn’t get her way, his to act the pampered prince—were due to their parents’ indulgence.

  Denise took pride in them all. How lovely the girls looked in the dresses she had sewn for them and how handsome Philippe was in his beloved sailor suit, which she had made by hand.

  Overseeing this happy scene, Rose Sauverin, André and Alex’s sixty-one-year-old mother, hardly looked her age despite a few slight wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her dark eyebrows and long lashes surrounded ever-bright hazel eyes and her thin smiling lips were made up prettily with just a hint of red. Rose possessed an especially fine sense of style and retained much of the beauty attested by her wedding pictures.

  Denise found her father-in-law Louis munching gaufrettes in the kitchen. Tickled as always to see him, she was shocked to discover Geneviève at the counter in her nightclothes compulsively gobbling fresh strawberries—a rare, prized item.

  “Geneviève! After all the trouble I went to get those for your birthday dinner tomorrow, why are you eating them now?”

  Mouth half full, Geneviève answered flatly, “Ask him,” nodding toward her husband.

  Denise locked eyes with Alexandre Sauverin’s blazing eyes and stifled a cry.

  Like his brother, Alex had awoken that morning in the dark. After a week and a half in his rented villa he still wasn’t sleeping well, unable to adjust to the murmurous crash of the surf though used to Brussels’s street noise, ever present in his grand apartment on the fashionable Avenue Émile Duray and in the smaller place on the Rue du Magistrat he and his family had moved to before coming here.

  Annoyed, Alex got up and pulled the drapes aside, careful not to rouse Geneviève who, always sensitive and delicate, was still weak from a bout of scarlet fever. Running his fingers through strands of brown hair thinning less quickly than those of his two-year-older brother, Alex watched the sea wash against the beach, listened to the harsh winds buffet the stuccoed walls of the villa, and worried about the grievous international situation. What would this day bring? Anything? Nothing? No matter. Alex needed distraction, which he always found in work as a dealer in rare and fine stamps, particularly the French Empire and Swiss Canton issues in which his expertise was unsurpassed.

  Focusing on his work improved his humor slightly, but Alex was constitutionally irritable. Alex couldn’t help it if the world was mostly comprised of fools!

  “Excuse me. Monsieur Alex?”

  Speaking of fools: the temerity of the maid breaking his concentration by coming in from next door without even knocking, and speaking Flemish, a sound he recoiled from even though it was his father’s native tongue. Not that Juli had a choice.

  “I was about to start breakfast,” she continued, oblivious of Alex’s anger. “Is there anything you would like?”

  “Privacy and quiet!” Alex snarled.

  The maid left with newly risen Katie and Philippe in tow, but Alex still couldn’t concentrate. He turned on the radio hoping music would soothe him. But there wasn’t any music. Only very bad news.

  His chest seemed to close in on his heart. Alex switched stations seeking confirmation and help in comprehending the extent and depth of the disaster. One after another—in French, Flemish, and English—rapid-fire BBC announcers relayed accounts of German assaults on Belgian military installations. Armories had sustained the worst damage and there had been massive casualties. Obviously the Germans had extremely accurate location information, which could only mean spies—and that the Nazis had deliberately targeted civilians.

  Unsurprised by this brutality, Alex worried about his brother. Suddenly he had the creepy feeling of being watched.

  How long had Geneviève been standing there? How much had she heard?

  Geneviève covered her mouth and raced across to the other villa.

  Wiping perspiration from her forehead, Denise decided to devote the remainder of her day to willful blindness. It was important to keep the news from the children.

  Alex said, “I need a breath of air,” turned on his heel, and walked out the back door.

  Denise asked Juli to take the children out to the beach to play. Then she, her sister, and their in-laws sat around the radio fretting. They started and stopped talking about what they must do, knowing nothing could be decided without André and Alex.

  If only André would call!

  When Alex got back, the rest of the grown-up Sauverins were finishing a dispirited late lunch.

  “Any word from André?” Alex asked.

  Denise looked down and shook her head.

  Alex went on. “I walked toward Zeebrugge and Knokke-Heist, to those wooded dunes dotted with pine trees—Wenduine I guess. At least five kilometers. Hardly saw a soul or any cars along the road. I suppose everyone’s indoors, glued to their radios.” He paused to see if his family had anything to say. They didn’t, but he still did. “Peering out at the waves, I half expected to see a U-boat’s periscope. Who called this war ‘phony’?” Again there was silence. “The prime minister claims Fort Eben-Emael will protect us. But the prime minister is wrong and we all know it. The Germans are too strong.”

  “The prime minister speaks for the government,” Rose said gently, having long ago learned that her second son was quick to anger and an alarmist.

  “I have never trusted the government,” Alex barked, “and particularly not now!”

  “But it is our government.”

  “Mother!” Alex retorted, not even trying to master his temper. “If you have such faith in the government why did you change your name from Rachel to Rose? Why did father change his from Levie to Louis?”

  Geneviève wept quietly. Rose’s eyes filled with tears she was too disciplined to shed.

  Every Sauverin knew the answer to Alex’s question: in late 1935, after the German promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race, Louis and Rose had tried to obscure their Jewish roots. The gesture had shocked their other relatives…except for Denise and Geneviève’s father, Josiah-Jacob Freedman, who had changed his name to Jack.

  Alex turned up the radio. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had announced his resignation and recommended Winston Churchill as his replacement. Denise translated for Louis and Rose, for though Louis spoke French, Flemish, and Dutch and Rose spoke French, German, and Polish, neither spoke English as their sons and daughters-in-law did.

  As he listened, Louis’s pale skin looked sallow and his gnarled hands knotted and unknotted convulsively. “What will we do?” he muttered. “What will we do?”

  “Leave,” Alex replied bluntly. “Isn’t that why we came to Le Coq? To be ready?”

  Denise focused on her role model, Rose—an exceptionally intelligent, knowledgeable, wise woman with an unshakable devotion to her loved ones. Rose’s gentle personality belied the steely determination with which she would support any decision André and Alex reached.

  Her sons would have to decide this because Louis—handsome and distinguished with his white hair, moustache and goatee, and fine black suit—had never taken a firm stand on anything. In seventy years his only show of independence was moving away from his birthplace and most of his family.

  Those concerns and more filtered into Denise’s dreams after her husband’s return Friday
night. When she awoke early Saturday next to still-sleeping André, she drifted mentally to thoughts of her father.

  Late in the summer of 1939, gregarious, generous Jack Freedman had summoned his daughters and sons-in-law unexpectedly from Brussels to his house at 204 Avenue Jan Van Rijswijcklaan. They had happily ridden to Antwerp on the new, clean electric train, knowing Jack loved to surround himself with family and friends, taking pride in seeing that a magnificent meal was served with a different correct wine for each course and that after dinner all retired to the library for coffee, cognac for the men, and sherry for the women.

  But all pleasure was replaced by anxiety when Jack announced he would not return from his annual visit to the south of France until the nasty business with the Nazis was finished. Poland hadn’t been invaded yet. But Jack, like André and Alex, knew…

  The men cut and lit fat cigars. André spoke of his plan to retreat to Le Coq—a plan Jack heartily approved. Though he would have felt easier if his children had chosen Great Britain, Jack Freedman believed Le Coq an excellent backup and insisted on giving them his large black 1938 Buick 57, in superb working order, to help them make the move and, when the time came, to move farther still.

  “I’m going to take some diamonds with me,” Jack said, referring to the immensely valuable cache he had kept after he and his father, Samuel, the founder of the family diamond business, had retired very comfortably many years before. “The rest I’m giving to you.” The announcement stunned the Sauverins but Jack explained, “It’s just a little security against the unknown. Hilde will take care of the house while I’m gone. That way she has a place to stay and the house will be ready for me when I come back.”

  Jack had cases of wine carried out to the car. “Wine may help you while away the hours on the shore. And I’d far rather you drink it than Hilde!” Then he reached through the open passenger-side window and handed Alex a velvet pouch containing some three dozen diamonds of various grades and sizes.

  By August Jack Freedman had decamped for the Bay of Biscay. On the first of September Germany had invaded Poland, the very day André had rented a villa on the coast. On the third André had driven Denise and their children to Le Coq, the small turn-of-the-century village with cottage-style dwellings rich in Belle Époque charm where they had spent several summers, including part of that summer of 1939. The adults were glad to be well-positioned to escape in whichever direction might seem best: east toward the Netherlands, north toward England, west toward France.