by Herman Wouk
“Such things are difficult to prove.” He spoke hesitantly. “It’s wartime. The world press is shut out of those areas. Even the German press is. Massacre victims can’t talk, and of course the murderers wouldn’t.”
“Drunkards talk, and Germans drink,” Selma said.
Mrs. Ascher touched his hand again. The strands of gray in her hair, the pretty bone structure of her wrinkled face, the long-sleeved black dress buttoned to the throat, all gave this woman of sixty or so a stately charm. “Why did you say conditions behind the German lines are fearful?”
“I saw some documentary evidence before I left Moscow.”
“What kind of documentary evidence?” The question came sharp and fast from the priest.
Less and less comfortable, Slote evaded. “Pretty much the sort of thing one hears about.”
The Englishman cleared his throat, rapped the table with a knuckle, and spoke in a rheumy voice. “Bern is such a gossipy small town, d’you know, Mr. Slote? One’s told you were sent from Moscow to Switzerland by your State Department for being too concerned about the Jews.”
“There’s no truth in it. My country’s State Department itself is very concerned about the Jews.”
“One’s told, in fact,” persisted the Englishman, “that you disclosed your documentary evidence to American newspapermen, and so incurred the displeasure of your superiors.”
Slote could not handle this probe smoothly. “Gossip is seldom worth discussing,” was all he said.
In the long silence that fell, a maid put small prayer books by each diner’s place. Dr. Ascher and his son solemnly intoned a grace in Hebrew, while Slote, feeling awkward, turned pages of German translation. When the men and women went to different sitting rooms for coffee, Selma cut Leslie Slote off in a hallway, putting both her arms on his. Her black velvet bodice half-revealed pretty breasts smaller than Natalie’s. Glancing around and seeing nobody else, she leaned to him, and gave him a little cool kiss on the mouth.
“What’s that for?”
“You are so skinny. We must feed you up.” She rushed away.
An entire floor of the house was Dr. Ascher’s library: a long dark room with floor-to-ceiling rows of volumes, most of them leather-bound. The smell was heavy, bookish, musty. On the wall behind a broad cluttered desk hung signed pictures of politicians and opera stars. A wooden stand nearby displayed a war map of the world full of colored pins.
“You’ve been listening to Radio Berlin again, Jacob!” At the map, the Englishman rapped shaky fingers on the Malay peninsula. “The Jap has been stopped much farther north than this.”
Ascher said to Slote, “You see, I am fool enough to bring the war into my spiritual retreat.”
“You’ve a better picture here than we do at the legation. We tend to forget the Pacific entirely.”
“But, Herr Slote, it’s the key, isn’t it? If Singapore should fall, that starts a slide” — he raked spread fingers down across India to Australia — “which may not end short of world chaos. “ He swept the fingers up to the German front in Russia, a wavy north-south row of red pins from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. “Look at what Hitler holds! The Soviet Union is a cripple without arms or legs.”
“Singapore won’t fall,” said the Englishman.
“And a sovereign nation can grow new limbs,” Slote said. “It’s a rude tough form of life, like a crab.”
Ascher’s whey-pale face wanly lit up at the comparison. “Ah, but Germany is so strong. If only she could be struck from behind!” The fingers jumped to the Atlantic coast. “But now the slide in East Asia will drag America and England in the other direction.” Ascher heavily sighed, and dropped on the brown leather sofa beside Slote.
“That jolly well mustn’t happen!” The Englishman, perching himself in a high-backed chair, began to needle Leslie Slote about the U-boat sinkings off the Atlantic shore. Couldn’t State’s countrymen exert enough self-discipline, even in wartime, to black out their coastal cities? Radio Berlin was openly boasting that the glow set up for the U-boats their easiest hunting of the war. The BBC had just confirmed appalling German figures for December sinkings off the American coast. At this rate the Allies were lost.
Furthermore — the old man was almost jumping from his chair, in worked-up indignation — why were the Japanese advancing so rapidly on Luzon? The British army was stretched all over the earth, and it had been at war for over two years; small wonder Singapore was threatened. But American forces in the Philippines had had two precious extra years of peace to prepare, and the United States wasn’t fighting anywhere else in the world. Why ‘weren’t the invaders being thrown into the sea? If America could not pull even that much weight in this war, well, then England would save civilization alone, and then confront the Russian bear afterward. But it would be a damned long haul. America had the resources, but it wanted the will to fight.
The tirade did not much anger Slote, for the manner and the cracking voice were senile. A peaceful nation needed time, he calmly returned, to get into the war mood. England under Chamberlain had showed that. But he had a question or two also. How did it help the British war effort to shut out of Palestine the Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler? How could a supposedly civilized democracy force women and children to keep sailing hopelessly around the Mediterranean in dangerous old hulks?
“There are reasons — reasons of regional policy, reasons of state —” the Englishman’s eyes watered, and he dashed a hand across them. “Empire brings responsibilities and dilemmas, you know — one’s sometimes between the devil and the deep — excuse me.” He got up and bolted from the room. In a moment his unpainted and unattractive daughter appeared and said, “We must be leaving.” With a reproachful look at Slote, she turned on her heel and went out.
“I’m sorry,” Slote said to Ascher.
“When Treville was on duty here in the legation,” Ascher said firmly, “he was our good friend. He’s unwell, he loves his country, and he’s old.”
So the party broke up. Slote and the priest went out together into a freezing windy starlit night. Putting up his collar, Slote said he would walk to his flat. The priest proposed to accompany him for the exercise. Slote thought the fat small cleric might hold him back, but it was he who had to hurry, as they strode under bare-limbed trees and past dry fountains. In the quiet night Slote could hear the priest’s hard even breathing. Vapor jetted from the broad nose as from a little steam engine. They did not exchange a word, walking about a mile.
“Well, here we are,” Slote said, halting outside his apartment house. “Thanks for the company.”
The priest looked straight in his face. “Would further documentary evidence about what is happening to the Jews interest you?” This was said abruptly in crisp German.
“What? Ah — certainly my government, as I said at dinner, is concerned to alleviate the sufferings of the Jews.”
The priest’s hand waved toward a gloomy little children’s park across the street, where swings and seesaws stood amid empty benches. They crossed the street and walked once around the park in silence.
“Frightful. Frightful. Frightful.” The words burst from the priest in a tone so different, so grief-stricken and intense, that Slote halted, shaken. The priest looked up at him, his face distorted in the light of a distant street lamp. “Herr Slote, I am Bavarian by birth. I watched this pile of filth, Adolf Hitler, make speeches on street corners to twenty people in Munich in 1923. I saw him make insolent speeches at his trial in 1924 after the putsch. At the 1936 Parteitag, I saw him speak to a million people. He has always been the same pile of filth. He has never changed. He hasn’t to this day. The same hand on the hip, the same shaking fist, the same vulgar voice, and dirty language, and stupid primitive ideas. And yet he is Master of Germany. He is the evil genius of my people. He is a scourge sent by God.”
Suddenly the priest resumed walking. Slote had to run a few steps to get beside him. “You must understand Germany, Herr Slote.” The tone was
calmer. “It is another world. We are a politically inexperienced people, we know only to follow orders from above. That is a product of our history, a protracted feudalism. We have been wavering for a century and a half between our dreamy socialist optimists, and our romantic materialistic pessimists. Between sweet visions of utopia, and brutal power theories. Basically, today, we are still caught between the liberal epicureanism of the western democracies, and the radical atheism of the eastern Bolsheviki.” The priest stretched his arms wide, as the abstract phrases rolled in a practiced way from his tongue. “And between them, a hideous gap, what a vacuum, what a void! Both these modernist humanisms propose to ignore God. We Germans know in our hearts that both these theses are equally oversimple and false. There we are right. There we are not deceived. We have been groping to put love and faith and, yes, Christ back into modern life. But we are naive, and we have been humbugged. An Antichrist has beguiled us, and with his brutish pseudoreligious nationalism he is leading us on the path to hell. Our capacity for religious fervor and for unthinking energetic obedience is unfortunately bottomless. Hitler and National Socialism are a ghastly perversion of an honest German thirst for faith, for hope, for a sound modern metaphysics. We are drinking salt water to quench our thirst. If he is not stopped, the end will be an immeasurable cataclysm.”
Deeply stirred, as much by the ever-tightening grip of the priest’s heavy hand as by this passionate outburst, Slote said, “I believe all that, and it is well said.”
The bullet head nodded. The priest said with a simper, in a ridiculous change to a casual tone, “Do you like the cinema? I’m very partial to the films myself. It’s a frivolous misuse of time, I confess.”
“Yes, I go to films.”
“How nice. Perhaps we could go together, some day.”
Foreign Service officers were approached from time to time with offers of intelligence, and movie houses were a commonplace rendezvous. It had never before happened to Slote. Nonplussed, he sparred, “What is your name again? I’m very sorry, I should have caught it, but I didn’t.”
“I am Father Martin. Shall we count on taking in a film together, one of these days? Let me give you a call.”
After a considerable pause, Slote nodded.
What went into that small gesture? Often thereafter Leslie Slote wondered, because it shaped the rest of his days. The sense of representing America, and the feeling that America was at bottom — whatever the surface cross-currents and prejudices — compassionate; his own haunting belief that he had been a short-sighted ass in rejecting a splendid Jewish girl; an itch to conquer his own timidity, which was beginning to disgust him; an awareness that his revelation of the Minsk documents to the Associated Press, however it had harmed his career, remained a source of perverse pride; finally, as much as anything else, curiosity; these things impelled him into a new life.
Three weeks went by. This strange talk in the night faded from Slote’s mind. Then out of the blue Father Martin called. “Mr. Slote, do you like Bing Crosby? I find him so amusing. The latest Bing Crosby film is playing at the Bijou cinema, you know.”
The priest was waiting with tickets already bought. For the seven o’clock showing the house was less than full. Father Martin took an aisle seat and Slote slipped in beside him. For a half hour or so they watched Bing Crosby, dressed as a collegian, caper and swap jokes with pretty girls in very short skirts. Without a word the priest left his seat to move farther down front. Shortly a thin man in glasses came and sat down, juggling a hat, an umbrella, and a thick envelope. The hat dropped to the floor. “Bitte,” he said, laying the envelope on Slote’s lap as he groped under the seat. On the other side of Slote, a pimply girl, watching Bing Crosby open-mouthed, observed none of this. The man retrieved the hat and settled down. Slote kept the envelope. When the picture ended he tucked it under his arm and left, his heart beating fast. In the twilight outside, nobody in the departing audience gave Slote a glance.
He strolled back to his flat, resisting the impulse to hurry, in fact to run. Behind locked doors and drawn shades, he pulled out of the envelope a sheaf of photostat pages, white on black; a copy of an official German document, stained on some pages with a brown slop that blurred the words. An acrid chemical smell rose from the dark sheets as he riffled them.
A rubber stamping on the top page stood out clearly, white on black — Geheime Reichssache (National Secret). The title of the documents was
CONFERENCE PROTOCOL
Meeting of Under Secretaries of State
Held in Gross-Wannsee, 20 January 1942
The first pages listed fifteen high government officials with orotund titles. Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy chief of the SS, had chaired their meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Slote was just starting to sight-translate the text when his telephone rang.
“Hello. It’s Selma Ascher. Will you take me dinner?”
“Selma! God, yes!” She burst into rich laughter at his enthusiasm. “When? Where?”
Before dressing, he skimmed the document. The main topic was a transfer by railroad of large numbers of European Jews to the conquered eastern territories, for forced labor on highways. This was neither novel nor very shocking. Russian and French war prisoners were being used as slave labor. The Germans were pressing even Italians into their factories. They were harsh overlords, and harshest to the Jews, hence the road-building project. Slote wondered why the priest had been at such pains to get the material to him. He tucked the envelope under his mattress for a close reading later.
Selma picked him up in her gray Fiat two-seater. Half-hidden by a white fox collar, her face was solemn as she greeted him, her eyes bright and shy. She drove to a tiny restaurant in a side street.
“Since meeting you I’ve done two bad things for the first time in my life.” Selma clasped and unclasped her small hands on the checked tablecloth. “One of them is to ask a man to take me to dinner.”
“That’s not so bad, and I’m happy you did. What’s the other thing?”
“Far worse.” She suddenly, heartily laughed, touched her hand on his, and jerkily withdrew it.
“Selma, your hand’s cold.”
“No wonder. I’m awfully nervous.”
“But why?”
“Well — to get one thing out of the way, it wasn’t my idea to ask you to dinner last month. Papa took me by surprise. You seem not to mind a forward girl — from what you’ve said about your friend in Siena — but that’s the last thing I am. I did tell my parents I’d met you. They’d heard about you. Papa’s headed the Jewish Council here for years. It’s been an education for me,” Selma exclaimed, talking rapidly after her first halting sentences, “a real education in cynicism, to see our friendships here in Bern dwindle down with every German victory. Papa has supported the hospital, the opera, the repertory theatre, everything! We used to be a popular family. Now — well —”
“Selma, who was the priest I met at your house?”
“Father Martin? A good German. Oh, they exist. There are many, but unfortunately not enough to make a difference. Father Martin has helped Papa get many South American visas.”
“He offered me secret information on German mistreatment of the Jews.”
“He did?”
“Would his information be reliable?”
“I can’t really judge anything about a priest, even a friendly one. I’m sorry.’’ She made an agitated negative gesture with both hands, as though waving the topic away. “Things are in such a turmoil at home! I had to get out tonight. Papa’s moving his business to America. He’s just exhausted, and Mother doesn’t want him to die of grief and worry. It’s a very complicated deal, it involves trading off factories in Turkey and Brazil, and I don’t know what else, and — I’m talking my head off.”
“I’m glad you’re confiding in me. I never repeat anything.”
“Does Natalie talk so much?”
“Much more. She’s quite opinionated, and very argumentative.”
�
�I think we’re not really much alike.”
“I’m rapidly forgetting the resemblance.”
“Truly? Poor me. That’s the only reason you were interested in me.”
“Not once you spoke half a dozen words.”
Selma Ascher colored and turned away her head, then faced him, bridling. “The other reason, the real one, that my father is moving is that I’m going to marry an American, a lawyer in Baltimore, quite orthodox.”
“Are you — well, are you yourself actually religious? Or do you conform to your parents’ wishes?”
“I have a fine Hebrew education. I even know some Talmud, which girls aren’t supposed to learn. I’ve always been a serious student. It makes my father happy. He and I are studying Isaiah together right now, and it’s really glorious. But as to God”— again she made the nervous negative gesture — “I grow more skeptical all the time. Where is He nowadays? How can He allow the things that are happening? I may yet become a lost soul.”
“Then what about marrying that devout young man?”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly marry any other kind.” She chuckled at his puzzled frown. “You don’t understand that? Well, you don’t have to.”
It was now perfectly evident to Slote that there was nothing doing with this girl. They talked aimlessly until the food came. He began to look for her unattractive points, an old trick of his when trying to back off. All girls had flaws. Selma’s long drippy earrings were badly chosen. Her sense of style was deficient: prudishness and femininity were awkwardly at odds in the high-necked dress, which concealed her throat but made provocative mounds of her small breasts. Her eyebrows were heavy and unplucked. What had seemed at first remarkable freshness and innocence apparently was nothing but overprotected narrowness. He was dining with — of all things — a pious virgin! He began to feel taken in. What was the point of this dinner?
“Do you like to dance?” Selma was picking idly at her steamed fish.
“So-so,” said Slote with faint ungraciousness. “And you?”
“I dance abominably. I’ve done it so little. I would like to dance tonight.”