The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  Roosevelt eventually turned to Joseph Kennedy and even the future Pope Pius XII to try to silence Coughlin, but it took Pearl Harbor to shut him down. And that wasn’t till the end of 1941, and in the meantime, in 1938, 1939, 1940, years so crucial to Hermann and his kind in Europe, America didn’t—couldn’t—do a thing.

  But who knew that in the summer of ’38? Especially since life went on at home as it always had, or almost. Hermann’s daughters were still nice girls, rich girls, though nice, rich girls who’d been tossed out of Vienna. No one said it out loud—on the contrary, they didn’t say it. Which turned out to be very much like always saying it, since it was always there. On the radio, even on the BBC, there was either Hitler himself, with his strange, high-pitched raving, or someone else, nonstop, raving about him.

  Even the plum harvest, the best time of the year, with all the work and celebration, took place under a shadow. The same workmen as always were building the same fires, just so, under the plum trees; and their sturdy wives were stirring the same sweet blue plums into jams and liqueurs in the ancient copper kettles as always; but instead of the usual laughter and joking, there seemed to be a strained silence—or was Hermann imagining it?

  But his wife felt it, too—or felt something. The people hadn’t brought their small children to play under the trees, she realized. When she asked about them—“They’re not sick?”—the women mumbled excuses, but didn’t meet her eye.

  Yes, that was it, said Hermann. No one looked him in the face anymore. Men he’d known for years, men whose fathers he’d known—he couldn’t understand it. He had always treated people well, he was known for it. “Pay as much as you can, not as little,” he’d taught his daughters. People flocked to work for him. They named their firstborns Hermann, or Aneta, for his wife.

  But now, when he walked among them, they fell silent. Turned and looked the other way. And inside the house, among friends, it was not much better. Women who’d come to discuss plums and sugar, to pick up the eternal argument over proportions and how long sugar should “stand” on fruit before cooking, would suddenly, apropos of nothing, blurt out that the Nazis were taking people’s houses in Berlin.

  Or launch into a recital of who’d already left—Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, finally Freud. Were they thinking of nothing else, then? Even Hermann himself, one afternoon, as they sat in the shade of the trees, drinking tea from the old tin cups and eating the first plum tarts—even he had looked up and said, as if he were continuing a conversation, that life in America wouldn’t agree with them.

  His daughters turned.

  “There’s no music there that we would like,” he said.

  “There’s jazz!” cried Gabi.

  “Jazz, but no Beethoven! No Mendelssohn! No Vienna.”

  And none of them spoke English, they would have no friends, no land, no plum trees—he waved his arm around him. Everyone fell silent.

  “It’s so beautiful here!” He turned to his wife, almost in tears. “How can it be finished?”

  His wife had grown up on this land. So had her parents. She had been born an Austro-Hungarian, but now was proud to be Czech.

  “Of course it’s not finished.” she summoned a smile. And it was still warm enough for a wade in the pond, if they finished their tea in time. It would be lovely in the water in the late-summer afternoon sun.

  BUT AUTUMN COMES EARLY in eastern Czechoslovakia. And even as the last of the old kettles were being scrubbed down with ash and hauled on carts back to the barns where they slept through the seasons, the ethnic Germans among their compatriots, who lived mainly in the western part of the country, were joining the Nazi Party in percentages surpassing even the Germans at home. Their allegiance, they insisted, was to Germany. Despite the accident of having been born in what was temporarily part of Czechoslovakia—again the betrayal, the treacherous treaty! Versailles!—they had always been Germans, not Czechs.

  Walter Runciman, an English envoy on a fact-finding mission, reported back to London on the logic of their position. The Germans’ descendants there did, after all, speak German. They looked German. Maybe they were German. Maybe Hitler had a point.

  Plus this was all he wanted, Runciman assured his government. Give him those parts of the country, their so-called Sudetenland, and then he’d leave everything else alone.

  The Czechs protested—Hitler’s “Sudetenland” was where their coal, their iron and steel works, their electrical plants were. Its mountains, wrapping around the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, provided the only natural defenses. Without them, the country would not be viable.

  But to the rest of the world, the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia offered the chance for “peace in our time,” and the English prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, took it. His name lives in infamy for that.

  But there were, in his defense, other names, long lists of them, in every village church in England, the World War I dead, hanging down the walls. Appalling lists—so many names from such small places, lost in “the War to End All Wars,” as they still called it in 1938.

  But if it wasn’t that, after all? What if another war was to be fought, a mere twenty years later? Meaningless, then, all those dead, and presumably Chamberlain felt that, and was trying to stop more writing on those walls when he and the French left Czechoslovakia to its fate in Munich that September.

  It was a popular move, at the time. Chamberlain was greeted upon his return by cheering crowds lining the streets of London. He had, he told the English, looked into Hitler’s face and seen there “a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”

  It might have helped, though, had he read Mein Kampf. “Peace in his time” was not on Hitler’s agenda.

  As would be seen, but these things happen as they happen, one by one. And what happened first, under the folded arms and misty eye of the English and French, was that the Nazis marched into the western edges of Hermann’s country, his “Little America,” and that was the end of that.

  4

  THIS WAS IN THE FALL OF 1938. The trees were bare by then, and there was a growing sense among Hermann and his family that they should have left the day they got the affidavit from America. But visas to America were no longer possible, and travel even within the country was becoming increasingly problematic. It seemed they now needed special permits on the trains.

  Special permits that Hermann feared might be refused to him. This was something he very much wanted to avoid—an actual out-and-out confrontation with the authorities, his friends till now, his compatriots, that might put him on the other side. The outside, in fact. No longer recognized as a Czech, somehow.

  As long as this didn’t happen in black and white, he could still maintain both the fiction of his dignity and some hope. But it was hard—the cold came fast and early that year, and the news from Germany was always worse. There was a rampage there, they heard, in November. The papers blamed a young Polish boy whose parents had been killed by the Nazis and who in turn had shot a German diplomat in Paris. The German people, outraged, had risen up spontaneously and broken shopwindows and set houses of worship on fire. They called it Kristallnacht, “Night of Crystal,” for all the broken glass.

  Bad news, Hermann and his friends shook their heads over the newspaper accounts, but at least explicable. The killing of the German diplomat, and then a hooligan rampage that had gotten out of hand. Nothing that hadn’t happened before.

  But that wasn’t how it was, it was far worse than that, said a young woman who had been there. She was passing through their village, hopping from train to train, heading east, and Hermann’s wife had invited her to dinner. After a few glasses of plum brandy, she started to talk.

  She was a student, studying philosophy at the University of Bonn, in Germany, and had been visiting an elderly aunt, in the nearby town of Cochem, on the Moselle River—

  “Cochem?” said Hermann’s wife. It was famous for its wines. They’d been there once on holiday. “A nice town,” she said.


  “Nice?” The girl gave a short laugh. She lifted her glass, drank it down. They saw that her hand was trembling.

  “Go on,” Hermann urged her. She took a deep breath.

  Of course it had already been getting difficult, she said. You understand.

  They understood, or were starting to. The increasing possibility of harassment in the streets, the new, ever-changing restrictions, even some imprisonments. Pitfalls that were starting to be set along their daily paths there too, these days.

  Well, so it was in Germany, though perhaps a little more advanced, a little more refined—and here Hermann could hear the university in her voice—“since it was the epicenter of the—activity, and home to its avant-garde.”

  Hermann refilled her glass. She drank again, and went on.

  And unless you were blind, as she had been—had to be! How else do you continue your studies, or try to continue, because there were restrictions there too! But she’d managed to get around them, had gotten dispensations, that sort of thing, and had been thinking that, with a little cleverness, she would be able to work through this thing, wait it out, but that sort of delusion was impossible now, after Kristallnacht.

  Granted they’d had their pretext—the shooting of the diplomat in Paris. But as for it being ‘a spontaneous uprising of the offended German people,” as Hitler claimed, it was nothing of the sort. The whole thing had been plotted and orchestrated by the SS, a new kind of Special Forces, who had dressed in civilian clothes for the operation, and launched a wild spree of destruction and killing that swept all of Germany, every city, every town.

  But once it got going, the girl said, it no longer needed the SS. It was as if the whole population had gone mad together.

  It started on the night of the ninth of November. She and her aunt were already asleep in their beds. When she heard the first shouting, very close, she thought she was dreaming. Her aunt lived in a very quiet neighborhood, prosperous and solid, no place for an uproar of any sort. But then there came more shouting, followed by a scream, a shot, and a woman’s voice very close: “My God, he’s dead!”

  Who? She jumped from her bed. A distinguished doctor lived next door. Had thieves broken into his house and killed him? The girl ran into the hall, to the telephone, to call the police, but the line was first busy, and then dead. And the noise from the street was getting worse.

  Was it a whole gang of thieves, then? But didn’t thieves act in silence? She’d been frightened at the thought of thieves, but more frightened still if it wasn’t thieves. She went softly into her aunt’s room, so as not to wake her if she still slept—she was old, with a bad heart, but her aunt was already sitting straight upright in her bed, her face white, her hand on her heart. From the street came more shots, more shouting, and then the sounds of glass breaking, cars screeching, a crash, and then another, of what might have been a wall falling down. They could smell fire, and her aunt thought that it must be an invading army, or even a natural disaster of some sort—an earthquake or a thunderbolt, though there’d been no rain.

  But as the shouts came closer, they started to make out the Nazi language, the name-calling, and then the nature of the disaster became clear. She said nothing to her aunt, but they could hear—couldn’t not hear—the cries and pleas of their neighbors being dragged from their houses and beaten. They waited for police sirens, but heard none.

  Her aunt’s husband had been a judge in the town, a decorated veteran of World War I. He had believed in twentieth-century Germany. “Our Fatherland,” he’d called it.

  “Where are the police?” her aunt kept asking.

  The girl didn’t tell her her worst fears—that this was the police. The elderly housekeeper appeared in the doorway, and the three women groped their way downstairs to the kitchen, and sat in the dark at the table in their nightgowns, waiting for the Nazis to smash in their door.

  Outside the shouting and crashing ebbed and flowed around them, coming closer and then moving away, “but never far enough.” At dawn, the frail housekeeper got to her feet and made coffee. The girl said she put two lumps of sugar in each cup, which was not her way.

  But why not, she must have been thinking, if this was to be their last cup of coffee? The girl herself was a student of philosophy, studying a highly complicated system of mathematical probability, but the mystery of life had come clear to her that night. It was even elegant in its simplicity: If some random boy in the street scratched his head and shot her, then even the most abstract and intricate systems would be, as far as she was concerned and in one fell swoop, solved. Over. If he scratched his back and shot the man next door instead, all the permutations and combinations would dance themselves on. That was all the logic there was to it. Her whole three-hundred-page thesis could be reduced to a simple if-then.

  She was through with her studies, she’d said aloud then. Her aunt and the housekeeper had nodded together, as if they already knew. None of them moved. If there was any safety at all for them, it was there, in the middle of the kitchen. The table had become a life raft, and the coffee an invisibility draught.

  Occasionally the housekeeper rose to make more, but that activity seemed to fall within the sphere of safety. Anything else might break the spell. The three women sat and drank into the morning. It was a gray day, November, and the light outside seemed all of one tone, early and late. There was still the screaming and the crashing from outside, and they still hadn’t moved when, sometime after noon, there came a knock on the door.

  They sat terrified, but then a voice called her aunt’s name politely, in the sort of tone not generally associated with the Nazis, and it turned out to be one of her late uncle’s colleagues, a young man he’d helped along, now a judge himself. He’d come to get them out, he called, to his wife’s mother’s villa, outside of town.

  Her aunt rose to pack a few things, but he said no, there was no time. He had a taxi waiting, and when they’d finally gotten her aunt into the car in her nightgown, he urged the man to drive fast and then faster. They had to take a circuitous route out of town, because of all the fires. Shops, houses, old places of worship—all blazing, but with no attempt to put out the fires.

  “Have they no water?” her aunt asked.

  But there was water, you could see it, the girl said, for the buildings nearby. It was only selected targets that were left burning. The firemen were standing in front of them, arms folded, watching them burn.

  All alike, said the girl, as if they’d been trained in the art of not putting out fires: “You fold your arms just so.”

  She was joking—the university again, thought Hermann. It was a shame this girl hadn’t been allowed to keep studying. She would have made a good logician, Wittgenstein-style.

  Her poor aunt couldn’t comprehend, though. “Why can’t they do anything?” she kept asking. “Is something the matter with the water?”

  Yes, yes, they told her, but she must have understood, because finally she lay back and closed her eyes. Which was good, because what would they have told her when they passed the children, laughing and throwing stones through stained-glass windows, and the men tossing leather-bound books onto bonfires already sky high?

  The worst part, she said, were the well-dressed women, really fashionably dressed, people who looked like her friends, or her parents’ friends, people she could have known—it was hard to see them shouting and cheering on the destruction, holding up their babies to see. Hard to have to face the truth that it wasn’t just the rabble on this rampage. It was everyone.

  The taxi had to detour down an elegant street, where men were throwing china and crystal out of the windows of some of the houses, crashing it down into the streets below. Things that they could have used, things of value—even a grand piano. This she saw with her own eyes, saw men pushing a grand piano, a Bechstein, over a balcony. It caught by one leg in the ironwork and hung there, in midair, to the wild cheering of the crowd below.

  The girl fell silent for a moment—her listeners, t
oo, sat stunned. To kill a man seemed easy these days, but to destroy a Bechstein piano, built by hand over years, with great art for great artists—finally from Hermann, a hoarse “Who?”

  The girl shrugged—that was the point. Anyone, everyone, the ticket-taker on the bus, the postman, the butcher’s boy, the countess. Nice women with their children—but all out of their heads, raving like lunatics, all of them. Like something out of the Greek myths, the Furies, or the witch burnings, right there, in Germany, five centuries before. No one knew to this day how many women they burned, but some sources claimed hundreds of thousands. Some said a million. Whole villages were left without one woman, she had read somewhere.

  She’d taken that as wild hyperbole at the time, but now she knew that whole towns could go mad. She had seen it, and seen, too, the way it unhinged its victims. Now she understood the bizarre confessions the accused witches had made. That they’d turned men into black cats and forced them into unspeakable acts on their broomsticks—she could understand that now. “You are no longer part of God’s ordered universe.” She herself had looked fearfully at the birds in the trees that day, half fearing that they might fly at her and peck out her eyes. When they drove across the gentle Moselle River, she was surprised it wasn’t raging. Actually surprised that it too hadn’t joined the madness.