by Herman Wouk
“Yes, I’d like that,” Pug said with alacrity. “Now, tell me something about this Jastrow girl.”
“What would you like to know?”
Victor Henry shrugged. “Anything. My wife and I are slightly curious about this young female who got our boy into such a jam. What the hell was she doing in Warsaw, with all of Europe mobilizing, and why was he with her?”
Slote laughed wryly. “She came to see me. We’re old friends. I thought she was out of her mind to come. I did my best to stop her. This girl is a sort of lioness type, she does what she pleases and you just get out of the way. Her uncle didn’t want her to travel alone, what with all the war talk. Byron volunteered to go along. That’s as I understand it.”
“He went with her to Poland as a courtesy to Dr. Jastrow? Is that the size of it?”
“Maybe you’d better ask Byron.”
“Is she beautiful?”
Slote puffed thoughtfully, staring straight ahead. “In a way. Quite a brain, very educated.” Abruptly he looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ll write you that letter, and I’m going to mention your son in my official report.”
“Good. I’ll ask him about that incident in Praha.”
“Oh, no, there’s no need. It was just an instance of how he cooperated.”
“You’re not engaged to the Jastrow girl?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well, I hate to get personal, but you’re much older than Byron, and quite different, and I can’t picture a girl who bridges that gap.” Slote looked at him and said nothing. Pug went on, “Where is she now?”
“She went to Stockholm with most of our people. Good-bye, Commander Henry.”
Rhoda telephoned Pug around noon, breaking into his work on the letter to Roosevelt. “That boy’s slept fourteen hours,” she said. “I got worried and went in there, but he’s breathing like an infant, with a hand tucked under his cheek.”
“Well, let him sleep.”
“Doesn’t he have to report somewhere?”
“No. Sleep’s the best thing for him.”
Complying with the President’s orders to write chattily, Pug closed his letter with a short account of Byron’s adventures in Poland. Plans were growing in his mind for official use of his son’s experiences. He filed the letter for the diplomatic pouch, and went home uneasy at having bypassed the chain of command and wasted a work day. He did also feel vague pride in his direct contact with the President, but that was a human reaction. In his professional judgment, this contact was most likely a bad thing.
Byron was reclining in the garden, eating grapes from a bowl and reading a Superman comic book. Scattered on the grass beside him were perhaps two dozen more comic books, a patchwork of lurid covers. “Hi, Dad,” he said. “How about this treasure? Franz collects them.” (Franz was the butler.) “He says he’s been panhandling or buying them from tourists for years.”
Pug was stupefied at the sight. Comic books had been a cause of war in their household until Byron had gone off to Columbia. Pug had forbidden them, torn them up, burned them, fined Byron for possession of them. Nothing had helped. The boy had been like a dope fiend. With difficulty Pug refrained from saying something harsh. Byron was twenty-four. “How do you feel?”
“Hungry,” Byron said. “God, this is a great Superman. It makes me homesick, reading these things.”
Franz brought Pug a highball on a tray. Pug sat silently with it waiting for the butler to go. It took a while, because Franz wiped a glass-top table, cut some flowers, and fooled with a loose screen door to the tennis court. He had a way of lingering within earshot. Meanwhile, Byron read the Superman through, put it on the pile, and looked idly at his father.
Pug relaxed and sipped his drink. Franz was reentering the house. “Briny, that was quite a tale you told us yesterday.”
The son laughed. “I guess I got kind of carried away, seeing you and Mom again. Also Berlin had a funny effect on me.”
“You’ve had access to unusual information. I don’t know if there’s another American who went from Cracow to Warsaw after the war broke out.”
“Oh, I guess it’s all been in the papers and magazines.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. There’s a lot of arguing between the Germans and the Poles—the few Poles who got away and can still argue—about who’s committed what atrocities in Poland. An eyewitness account like yours would be an important document.”
Byron shrugged, picking up another comic book. “Possibly.”
“I want you to write it up. I’d like to forward your account to the Office of Naval Intelligence.”
“Gosh, Dad, aren’t you overestimating it?”
“No. I’d like you to get at it tonight.”
“I don’t have a typewriter,” Byron said with a yawn.
“There’s one in the library,” Pug said.
“Oh, that’s right, I saw it. Well, okay.”
With such casual assents, Byron had often dodged his homework in the past. But his father let it go. He was clinging to a belief that Byron had matured under the German bombing.
“That fellow Slote came by today. Said you helped out a lot in Warsaw. Brought water to the embassy, and such.”
“Well, yes. I got stuck with the water job.”
“Also there was an incident at the front line with the Swedish ambassador. You climbed a tower under German fire, while Slote had to hide this Jastrow girl in a farmhouse. It seems to be very much on his mind.”
Byron opened Horror Comics, with a cover picture of a grinning skeleton carrying a screaming half-naked girl up a stone staircase. “Oh, yes. That was right before we crossed no-man’s-land. I made a sketch of the road.”
“Why does Slote dwell on it?”
“Well, it’s about the last thing that happened before we left Warsaw, so I guess it remained in his mind.”
“He intends to write me a letter of commendation about you.”
“He does? That’s fine. Has he got any word on Natalie?”
“Just that she’s gone to Stockholm. You’ll start on that report tonight?”
“Sure.”
Byron left the house after dinner and returned at two in the morning. Pug was awake, working in the library and worrying about his son, who blithely told him he had gone with other Americans to the opera. Under his arm Byron carried a new copy of Mein Kampf in English. Next day when Pug left the house Byron was up and dressed, lounging on the back porch in slacks and a sweater, drinking coffee and reading Mein Kampf. At seven in the evening the father found Byron in the same place, in the same chair, drinking a highball. He was well into the thick tome, which lay open on his lap. Rubbing bleary eyes, he gave his father a listless wave.
Pug said, “Did you start on that report?”
“I’ll get to it, Dad. Say, this is an interesting book. Did you read it?”
“I did, but I didn’t find it interesting. About fifty pages of those ravings give you the picture. I thought I should finish it, so I did, but it was like wading through mud.”
Byron shook his head. “Really amazing,” and turned the page.
He went out again at night, returned late, and fell asleep with his clothes on, an old habit that ground on Pug’s nerves. Byron woke around eleven, and found himself undressed and under the covers, his clothes draped on a chair, with a note propped on them: WRITE THAT GODDAMN REPORT.
He was idling along the Kurfürstendamm that afternoon, with Mein Kampf under his arm, when Leslie Slote went hurrying past him, halted, and turned. “Well, there you are! That’s luck. I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Are you coming back to the States with us or not? Our transportation’s set for Thursday.”
“I’m not sure. How about some coffee and pastry? Let’s be a couple of Berliners.”
Slote pursed his lips. “To tell the truth, I skipped lunch. All right. What the devil are you reading that monstrosity for?”
“I think it’s great.”
“Great! That’s an u
nusual comment.”
They sat at a table in an enormous sidewalk café, where potted flowering bushes broke up the expanse of tables and chairs, and a brass band played gay waltzes in the sunshine.
“God, this is the life,” Byron said, as they gave orders to a bowing, smiling waiter. “Look at all these nice, polite, cordial, joking, happy Berliners, will you? Did you ever see a nicer city? So clean! All those fine statues and baroque buildings, like that marvellous opera, and all the spanking new modern ones, and all the gardens and trees—why, I’ve never seen such a green, clean city! Berlin’s almost like a city built in a forest. And all the canals, and the quaint little boats—did you see that tug that sort of tips its smokestack to get under the bridges? Completely charming. The only thing is, these pleasant folks have just been blowing the hell out of Poland, machine-gunning people from the sky—I’ve got the scar to prove it—pounding a city just as nice as Berlin to a horrible pulp. It’s a puzzle, you might say.”
Slote shook his head and smiled. “The contrast between the war front and the back area is always startling. No doubt Paris was as charming as ever while Napoleon was out doing his butcheries.”
“Slote, you can’t tell me the Germans aren’t strange.”
“Oh, yes, the Germans are strange.”
“Well, that’s why I’ve been reading this book, to try to figure them out. It’s their leader’s book. Now, it turns out this is the writing of an absolute nut. The Jews are secretly running the world, he says. That’s his whole message. They’re the capitalists, but they’re the Bolsheviks too, and they’re conspiring to destroy the German people, who by rights should really be running the world. Well, he’s going to become dictator, see, wipe out the Jews, crush France, and carve off half of Bolshevist Russia for more German living space. Have I got it right so far?”
“A bit simplified, but yes—pretty much.” Slote sounded amused but uneasy, glancing at the tables nearby.
“Okay. Now, all these nice Berliners like this guy. Right? They voted for him. They follow him. They salute him. They cheer him. Don’t they? How is that? Isn’t that very strange? How come he’s their leader? Haven’t they read this book? How come they didn’t put him in a padded cell? Don’t they have insane asylums? And who do they put in there, if not this guy?”
Slote, while stuffing his pipe, kept looking here and there at the people around them. Satisfied that nobody was eavesdropping, he said in a low tone, “Are you just discovering the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler?”
“I just got shot in the head by a German. That sort of called my attention to it.”
“Well, you won’t learn much from Mein Kampf. That’s just froth on top of the kettle.”
“Do you understand Hitler and the Germans?”
Slote lit his pipe and stared at the air for several seconds. Then he spoke, with a wry little smile of academic condescension. “I have an opinion, the result of a lot of study.”
“Can I hear it? I’m interested.”
“It’s a terribly long story, Byron, and quite involved.” Slote glanced around again. “Some other time and place I’ll be glad to, but—”
“Would you give me the names of books to read, then?”
“Are you serious? You’d let yourself in for some dull plodding.”
“I’ll read anything you tell me to.”
“Well, let me have your book.”
On the flyleaf of Mein Kampf, Slote listed authors and titles all the way down the page, in a neat slanted hand, in purple Polish ink. Running his eye down the list, Byron felt his heart sink at the unfamiliar array of Teutonic authors, each name followed by a heavy book title, some by two:
… Treitschke—Moeller van den Bruck—Fries—Menzel—Fichte—Schlegel—Arndt—Jahn—Rühs—Lagarde—Langbehn—Spengler…
Among them, like black raisins in much gray dough, a few names from his contemporary civilization course at Columbia caught his eye: Luther—Kant—Hegel—Schopenhauer—Nietzsche. He remembered that course as a nuisance and a nightmare. He had passed with a D minus, after frantic all-night cramming of smudgy lecture notes from the fraternity files. Slote drew a heavy line, and added more books with equally forbidding authors’ names:
… Santayana—Mann—Veblen—Renan—Heine—Kolnai—Rauschning…
“Below the line are critics and analysts,” he remarked as he wrote. “Above are some German antecedents of Hitler. I think you must grasp these to grasp him.”
Byron said dolefully, “Really? The philosophers too? Hegel and Schopenhauer? Why? And Martin Luther, for pity’s sake?”
Contemplating the list with a certain arid satisfaction, Slote added a name or two as he pulled hard at his pipe, making the bowl hiss. “My view is that Hitler and the Nazis have grown out of the heart of German culture—a cancer, maybe, but a uniquely German phenomenon. Some very clever men have given me hell for holding this opinion. They insist the same thing could have happened anywhere, given the same conditions: defeat in a major war, a harsh peace treaty, ruinous inflation, mass unemployment, communism on the march, anarchy in the streets—all leading to the rise of a demagogue, and a reign of terror. But I—”
The waiter was approaching. Slote shut up and said not a word while they were being served. Watching the waiter until he went out of sight, the Foreign Service man drank coffee and ate cake. Then he started again, almost in an undertone.
“But I don’t believe it. To me Nazism is unthinkable without its roots in German nineteenth-century thought: romanticism, idealism, nationalism, the whole outpouring. It’s in those books. If you’re not prepared to read every word of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, for instance, give up. It’s basic.” He shoved the book back to Byron, open at the flyleaf. “Well, there you are, for a starter.”
“Tacitus?” Byron said. “Why Tacitus? Isn’t he a Roman historian?”
“Yes. Do you know about Arminius, and the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Okay. In the year 9 A.D., Byron, a German war leader named Arminius stopped the Romans at the Rhine, once and for all, and so secured the barbarian sanctuary in the heart of Europe. It’s a key event in world history. It led eventually to the fall of Rome. It’s affected all European politics and war to this hour. So I believe, and therefore I think you should read Tacitus’s account of the campaign. Either you go into these things, or you don’t.”
Byron kept nodding and nodding, his eyes narrowed and attentive. “You’ve read all these books? Every one?”
Slote regarded the younger man quizzically, gnawing his pipe. “I haven’t retained them as well as I should, but, yes, I have.”
“What you’re actually trying to tell me, I imagine, is to go peddle my papers, that this is a subject for Rhodes Scholars.”
“Not at all, but it is a hard subject. Now, Byron, I’m really overdue at the embassy. Are you or aren’t you coming with us? We fly to Oslo Thursday, and from there to London. Then we just take our chances—destroyer, freighter, ocean liner, maybe an airplane trip via Lisbon—whatever turns up.”
Byron said, “What are Natalie’s plans? She got kind of snappish with me toward the end, and wouldn’t talk much.”
Slote looked at his watch. “She was disagreeable and vague with me, too. I really don’t know.” He hesitated. “I’ll tell you something else. You may not like it. You may not believe it. But it’s so, and possibly you’d be better off knowing it.”
“Go ahead.”
“I asked her about you, whether you planned to return to Siena. Her answer was, ‘Well, I hope not. I sincerely hope I never see Byron Henry again, and if you ever get a chance, please tell him so with my compliments.’—You look surprised. Didn’t you have an argument before she left? I was positive you had.”
Byron, trying to compose his face, said, “Not exactly. She just seemed grouchy as hell.”
Slote said, “She was in a gruesome mood. Said she had a bad backache from all the train riding, for one
thing. Very likely she meant nothing by it. I know she felt grateful to you. As indeed I do.”
Byron shook his head. “I can’t say I’ve ever understood her.”
Slote glanced at the check and said, tucking bright-colored marks under a saucer, “Well, look, Byron, there’s no time to discuss Natalie Jastrow. I’ll tell you this. I’ve had no peace of mind since the day I first met her two years ago, at a very stupid cocktail party on the Quai Voltaire.”
“Why don’t you marry her?” Byron said, as Slote started to rise.
The older man fell back in his chair, and looked at him for several seconds. “All right. I’m not at all sure I won’t, Byron, if she’ll have me.”
“Oh, she’ll have you. I’ll tell you what. I guess I’ll stay on here with my folks for a while. I won’t go to Oslo.”
Slote stood, holding out his hand. “I’ll give your passport and so forth to your father’s yeoman. Good luck.”
Byron said, shaking hands and gesturing at Mein Kampf, “I appreciate the lecture and the list.”
“Small return,” Slote said, “for services rendered.”
“Will you let me know,” Byron said, “if you get word before you leave Berlin about where Natalie went?”
Knocking out his pipe against his palm, Slote said, “Certainly,” and hurried off into the sidewalk crowd. Byron ordered more ersatz coffee and opened Mein Kampf, as the café band struck up a merry Austrian folk dance.
16
DURING Victor Henry’s absence in the States, his wife had tangled herself in a romance; something she had not done in his much longer absences through almost twenty-five years. There was something liberating for her in the start of a war. She was forty-five. Suddenly the rules she had lived by so long seemed slightly out of date. The whole world was shaking itself loose from the past; why shouldn’t she, just a wee bit? Rhoda Henry did not articulate this argument. She felt it in her bones and acted on it.
