by Herman Wouk
Yet none of this signalled to me the truth. My meeting with Eichmann did. Why? It is the oldest psychological fact, I suppose, that one cannot really feel another’s misery. And worse; let me face for once in my life this raw reality; the misery of others can make one glad and relieved that one has been spared.
Eichmann is not a low police brute. Nor is he a banal bureaucrat, though that is the role he brilliantly puts on when it suits him. Much more than the flamboyant fanatic Hitler, this businesslike Berlin official is the dread figure that has haunted the twentieth century and precipitated two wars. He is a reasonable, intelligent, brisk, even affable fellow. He is one of us, a civilized man of the West. Yet in a twinkling he can order horrible savagery perpetrated on an old feeble man, and look on calmly; and in another twinkling can return to polite European manners, without the slightest sense of any inconsistency, even with a sardonic smirk at the discomfiture of the victim who cannot conceive of this version of human nature. Like Hitler, he is an Austrian. Like him, in this dread century, he is the German.
I have grasped this difficult truth. Nevertheless, I will go to my death refusing to condemn an entire people. We Jews have had enough of that. I will remember Karl Frisch, the historian, who came to Yale from Heidelberg, a German to the bone, a sweet, liberal, profound man with a superb sense of humor. I will remember the wonderful yeasting of art and thought in Berlin in the twenties. I will remember the Hergesheimers, with whom I stayed for six months in Munich, people of the first quality with — I will swear — no taint of anti-Semitism, at a time when it was becoming a volcanic political rumble. Such Germans exist. They exist in large numbers. They must, to have created the beauty of Germany, and the art, and the philosophy, and the science; what was known as Kuhur long before it became a name of execration and horror.
I do not understand the Germans. Attila, Alaric, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, in the fury of conquest exterminated all who resisted them. The Moslem Turks slaughtered the Christian Armenians during the World War, but the Armenians were taking the part of the enemy, czarist Russia, and it happened in Asia Minor.
The Germans are part of Christian Europe. The Jews have passionately embraced and enriched the German culture, the arts, the sciences. In the World War the German Jews had a record of insensate loyalty to the Kaiser. No, there has been nothing like this before. We are caught in a mysterious and stupendous historical process, the grinding birth pangs of a new age; and as at the dawn of monotheism and of Christianity, we are fated to be at the heart of the convulsion, and to bear the brunt of its agony.
My lifelong posture of learned agnostic humanism was all very fine. My books about Christianity were not without merit. But taking it all in all, I have spent my life on the run. Now I turn and stand. I am a Jew. A fine earthy vulgarism goes, “What that man needs is a swift kick in the arse.” It would seem to be my biography.
Berel Jastrow is in Prague.
That is almost all I know: that he is there, working in the underground, having escaped from a concentration camp. He sent me word through a communist grapevine that links Prague and Theresienstadt. To identify and authenticate himself, he used a Hebrew phrase that on Gentile tongues (for the Czech gendarmerie is the main transmitter) became almost undecipherable. Still, I puzzled it out: hazak ve’emats, “Be strong and of good courage.”
It is amazing that this iron-willed resourceful cousin of mine is alive, close by, and aware of my incarceration here; but nothing is too amazing in the chaotic maelstrom that the Germans have made of Europe. I have not seen Berel in fifty years, yet Natalie’s description has made him a commanding presence in my mind. That he can do anything for us is unlikely. My health would not endure an escape effort, even if such a thing were possible. Nor could Natalie risk it, with the child on her hands. What, then? My hope is only that of every other Jew in this trap: that the Americans and British will land in France very soon, and that National Socialist Germany will be smashed between assaults coming from the east and the west, in time to set us free.
Still, it is wonderful that Berel is in Prague. What an odyssey he must have lived, since Natalie last saw him in falling Warsaw, four eternal years ago! His survival must be called a miracle; the fact that he is so near, another miracle. Such things give me hope; make me, in fact, “strong and of good courage.”
74
PUG HENRY had been feverish for days, victim of some endemic Persian bug. Riding trains and trucks day and night through towns, farmlands, dust storms, blistering deserts, and snowy mountain passes, he had fallen into a lethargy in which — especially at night — fever dreams and reality had run together. He had arrived at Connolly’s headquarters light-headed, and had been hard put to it to stay alert even talking to Hopkins and Roosevelt. Through those long whirling hours on the convoy route, Pamela and Burne-Wilke had come and gone in his hectic visions much as his dead son and his living family had. Pug could consciously seal off Pamela, like Warren, in a forbidden section of memory, but he could not help his dreams.
So the sight of Burne-Wilke in the Russian embassy villa was startling: a fever-dream figure, standing there beside the cold real Ernest King. Pamela in Tehran! He could not, under King’s hard eye, ask straight out, “Are you married?” He left Roosevelt’s villa not knowing whether he should inquire at the British legation for Lady Burne-Wilke or Pamela Tudsbury.
Stalin and Molotov were approaching on a gravel path as Pug came out, Molotov talking earnestly, Stalin smoking a cigarette and glancing about. Seeing Pug he nodded and half-smiled, his wrinkled eyes flashing clear recognition. Pug was used to politicians’ memories, but this surprised him. It was over two years since he had delivered Hopkins’s letter to Stalin. The man had borne the weight of a gigantic war all that time; yet he really seemed to remember. Tubby, gray, shorter than Victor Henry, he strode bouncily up the steps into the villa. Pug had had almost a year of the Moscow iconography — statues, paintings, gigantic photographs — presenting Stalin as a remote legendary all-wise Savior, one of a cloud-riding trinity with the dead Marx and Lenin; and there went the flesh and blood reality, a small paunchy old fellow in a beige uniform with a broad red stripe down the pants. Yet the icons in a way were more true than that reality; so Pug thought, recalling scenes on the vast Russian front that Stalin’s will controlled, and remembering too his history of murdering millions. A stone-hearted colossus had gone by in that little old man.
Winston Churchill, whom he had met more often, did not recognize Pug. Accompanied by two stiff-striding generals and a pudgy admiral, chewing on a long cigar, he left the British compound as Pug was identifying himself at the gate. The filmy shrewd eyes looked straight at Pug and through him, and the stooped rotund figure in a white suit ambled on. The Prime Minister appeared dull and unwell.
Inside the British legation a few armed soldiers walked about the gardens, and civilians in little knots chatted in the sunshine. This was a much smaller and quieter establishment. Pug paused to take thought under a tree shedding golden leaves. Where to find her? How to ask for her? He was able to grin wryly at his own pettiness. An earth-shaking event was happening here, yet on this peak of high history, what excited him was not the sight of three world giants, but the prospect of laying eyes on a woman he saw once or twice a year by the chances of war.
Their week in Moscow, cut to four days by a whim of Standley’s, remained in his memory as a burst of beauty like his honeymoon: serene, sweet, nothing but companionship at meals, in long walks, in Spaso House, at the Bolshoi, at a circus, in her hotel suite. They had talked endlessly, like lifelong friends, like husband and wife, meeting after a separation. In the last evening at her hotel he had even talked about Warren. The thoughts and feelings had broken from him. In Pamela’s face, and in her brief gentle comments, he had found comfort. They had managed to part next day with smiles and casual words. Neither had said that it was an ending, but to Pug, at least, it had been nothing else. Now here she was again. He could no more resist looking for her than h
e could will to stop breathing.
“Hullo! There’s Captain Henry.” This time it really was Granville Seaton, standing with some men and women in uniform. Seaton came and took his arm, with far more warmth than he had displayed in their journeying together. “What cheer, Captain? Wearing business, that truck route, what? You look fairly done up.”
“I’m all right.” Pug gestured in the direction of the Soviet embassy. “I just told Harry Hopkins your ideas about a new treaty.”
“You did? You actually did? Smashing!” Seaton hugged his arm close, exhaling a strong tobacco breath. “What was his reaction?”
“I can tell you the President’s reaction.” In his light-headedness Pug blurted this. His temples throbbed and his knees felt weak.
Seaton spoke intensely, his eyes searching Pug’s face. “Tell me, then.”
“The thing was discussed at the Moscow Conference of foreign ministers last month. The Russians stalled. That’s that. The President won’t thrust the United States into your old rivalries. He’s got a war to win and he needs Stalin.”
Seaton’s face fell into lines of sadness. “Then the Red Army will never leave Persia. If what you say is accurate, Roosevelt’s pronouncing a long-range doom on all free men.”
Victor Henry shrugged. “I guess he figures on fighting one war at a time.”
“Victory is meaningless,” Seaton exclaimed, “except in its effect on the politics of the future. You people have yet to grasp that.”
“Well, if an initiative came from the Iranians that might be different. So Hopkins said.”
“The Iranians?” Seaton grimaced. “Forgive me, but Americans are tragically naïve about Asia and Asian affairs. The Iranians won’t take the initiative, for any number of reasons.”
“Seaton, do you know Lord Burne-Wilke?”
“The air vice marshal? Yes, they’ve brought him here on the Burma business. He’s over at the plenary session now.”
“I’m looking for his aide, a WAAF.”
“I say, Kate!” Seaton called and beckoned. A pretty woman in a WAAF uniform left the group he had been chatting with. “Captain Henry here is looking for the future Lady Burne-Wilke.”
Green eyes snapped in a snub-nosed face, giving Pug a quick pert inspection. “Ah, yes. Well, everything’s in such a muddle. She brought masses of maps and charts and whatnot. I think they installed her in the anteroom outside the office that Lord Gore is using.”
“I’ll take you there,” Seaton said.
Two desks jammed the little room on the second floor of the main building. At one of them a pink-faced officer with a bushy mustache was hammering at a typewriter. Yes, he said peevishly, the other desk had been shoved into the room for Burne-Wilke’s aide. She had worked at it for hours, but had left not long ago to shop at the Tehran bazaar. Seizing a scrap of paper on Pamela’s desk, Victor Henry scrawled, Hi! I’m here, at the U.S. Army base officers’ quarters. Pug, and jammed it on a spike. He asked Seaton as they walked outside, “Where’s this bazaar?”
“I don’t recommend that you go looking for her there.”
“Where is it?”
Seaton told him.
General Connolly’s driver took Pug into the old part of Tehran, and left him at the bazaar entrance. The exotic mob, the heavy smells, the foreign babble, the garish multitudinous signs in a strange alphabet, dizzied him. Peering past the stone arcades at the entrance, he saw crowded gloomy passageways of shops receding out of sight. Seaton was right. How could one find anybody here? Yet the conference was due to last only three days. This day was already melting away. Communication in this Asian city, especially amid the helter-skelter doings of an improvised conference, was chancy. They might even miss each other entirely if he did not make an effort to find her. “The future Lady Burne-Wilke,” Seaton had called her. That was what mattered. Pug went plunging in to look for her.
He saw her almost at once, or thought he did. He was passing by shop after shop of tapestries and linens, when a narrow passageway opened off to the right, and glancing down it past the crowd of black-veiled women and burly men, through hanging leather coats and sheepskin rugs, he spotted a trim little figure in blue, wearing what looked like a WAAF cap. Shouting at her was hopeless, above the din of merchant cries and bargaining. Pug shouldered through the mob and came to a broader cross-gallery, the section of carpet dealers. She was not in sight. He set off in the direction she had been moving. In an hour of sweaty striding through the pungent, crowded, tumultuous labyrinth, he did not see her again.
Had he not been in a fever it would still have seemed dreamlike, this frustrated quest for her through a thronged maze. All too often he had had just such nightmares about Warren. Whether he was looking for him at a football game, or in a graduation crowd, or aboard an aircraft carrier, the dream was always the same: he would glimpse his son just once, or he would be told that Warren was close by, and he would pursue and pursue and never find him. As he tramped sweatily round and round the galleries, feeling ever lighter in the head and queerer about the knees, he came to realize that he was not behaving normally. He groped back to the entrance, bargained in sign language with a cab driver in a rusty red Packard touring car, and paid a crazy price for a ride to the Amirabad base.
The next clear thing that happened to Pug Henry was that somebody shook him and said, “Admiral King wants to see you.” He was lying clothed on a cot in the officers’ quarters, bathed in sweat.
“I’ll be with him in ten minutes,” Pug said through chattering teeth. He took a double dose of pills that were supposed to control the ailment, and a heavy slug of Old Crow; showered and rapidly dressed, and hurried through the starlit darkness in his heavy bridge coat to General Connolly’s residence. When he came into King’s suite, the admiral’s glowering glance changed to a look of concern. “Henry, get yourself to sick bay. You’re damned green around the gills.”
“I’m okay, Admiral.”
“Sure? Want a steak sandwich and a beer?” King gestured at a tray on the desk between piles of mimeographed documents.
“No, thank you, sir.”
“Well, I saw history made today.” King talked as he ate, in an unusually benign vein. “That’s more than Marshall and Arnold did. They missed the opening session, Henry. Fact! Our Army Chief of Staff and the boss of the Air Corps flew halfway around the world for this meeting with Stalin, then, by God, they didn’t get the word, and tooled off sightseeing. Couldn’t be located. Ha ha ha! Isn’t that a snafu for the books?”
King emptied his glass of beer and complacently touched a napkin to his mouth. “Well, I was there. That Joe Stalin is one tough gent. Completely on top of things. Doesn’t miss a trick. He put a hell of a spoke in Churchill’s wheel today. I think all the talk about pooping around in the Mediterranean is finished, over, done with. It’s a new ball game.” King looked hard at him. “Now you’re supposed to know something about landing craft.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Searching through piles of documents, King pulled several out as he talked. “Churchill turns purple, just talking to me about landing craft. I spoil his fun. We’ve got thirty percent of new construction allotted to the Pacific, and I have to be a son of a bitch about them, or they’d melt away in his wild invasion schemes.” He brandished a sheaf of documents. “Here’s a British op-plan for a landing on Rhodes, for instance, which I consider absolutely asinine. Churchill asserts that it’ll pull Turkey into the war, set the Balkans aflame, and blah blah blah. Now what I want you to do —”
General Connolly knocked, and entered in a heavy checkered bathrobe. “Admiral, Henry here has been invited to dinner by the Minister of the Imperial Court. This just arrived by hand. A car’s waiting.”
Connolly gave Pug a large cream-colored unsealed envelope.
“Who’s the Minister of the Imperial Court?” King asked Pug. “And how do you know him?”
“I don’t, Admiral.” A scrawled note clipped to the crested card explained the i
nvitation; but he did not mention it to King.
Hi— I’m a houseguest here. Talky and the minister were old good friends. It was this or the YWCA for me. Do come. P.
“Hussein Ala is the second or third man in the government, Admiral,” said General Connolly. “Sort of a grand vizier. Better send Pug along. The Persians have peculiar ways of doing things.”
“Like the heathen Chinee,” said King. He threw the documents on the desk. “Okay, Henry, see me when you return. No matter what time.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The black Daimler driven by a silent man in black went twisting through the walls of old Tehran, and halted in a narrow moonlit street. The driver opened a small door in a wall; Victor Henry had to stoop to go through. He walked down into a lantern-lit garden spacious as the Soviet embassy, with fountains spouting sparkling waters, rivulets murmuring in canals among the towering trees and sculptured shrubbery, and at the other side of this opulent private park, many lighted windows showing. A man in a long crimson garment, with enormous drooping black mustaches, bowed to Pug as he came in, and led him around the fountains and through the trees. In the foyer of the mansion Pug got a peripheral impression of inlaid wood walls, a high tiled ceiling, and rich tapestries and furniture. There stood Pamela in uniform. “Hi. Come and meet the minister. Duncan’s late for dinner. He’s staying at the officers’ club.”
The mustachioed man was helping Pug take off the bridge coat. Unable to find words for the joy he felt, Pug said, “This is somewhat unexpected.”
“Well, I got your note, and I wasn’t sure I’d see you otherwise. We’re flying back to New Delhi day after tomorrow. The minister was very sweet about inviting you. I told him a thing or two about you, of course.” She put her hand to his face, looking worried, and he saw the glitter of a large diamond. “Pug, are you all right?”