German romanticism is a terribly important and powerful critique of the way the West lives, Jastrow. It faces all the nasty weaknesses."
"Such as?" Her tone was mean and abrupt.
A rush of argument broke from Slote, as though he wanted to conquer her with words in Byron's presence, if he could do nothing else. He began stabbing one finger in the air, like exclamation points to his sentences.
"Such as, my dear, that Christianity is dead and rotting since Galileo cut its throat. Such as, that the ideas of the French and American revolutions are thin fairy tales about human nature. Such as, that the author of the Declaration of Independence owned Negro slaves.
Such as, that the champions of liberty, equality, and fraternity ended up chopping off the heads of helpless women, and each other's heads.
The German has a very clear eye for such points, Natalie. He saw through the rot of imperial Rome and smashed it, he saw through the rot of the Catholic Church and broke its back, and now he thinks Christian industrial democracy is a rotting sham, and he proposes to take over by force. His teachers have been telling him for a century that his turn is coming, and that cruelty and bloodshed are God's footprints in history. That's what's in the books I listed for Byron, poured out in great detail. It's a valid list. There was another strain in Germany, to be sure, a commonsense liberal humanist tendency linked with the West. The 'good Germany!" I know all about it, Natalie. Most of its leaders went over to Bismarck, and nearly all the rest followed the Kaiser. When his time came, Hitler had a waltz. Now listen!"
In a solemn tone, like a priest chanting a mass, beating time in the air with a stiff finger, Slote quoted: "The German revolution will not prove any miuff or gentler because it was preceded by the Critique of Kant, by the Transcendental Idealism of Fichte. These' doctrines served to develop revolutionary forces that only await their times, to break forth.
Christianity subdued the brutal warrior passion of the Germans, but it could 'not quench it. When the cross, that restraining talism", falls to pieces, then will break forth again the frantic Berserker rage. The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries. Thor with his giant hamtwr will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals."
Slote made an awkward, weak gesture with a fist to represent a hammer-blow, and went on: "'Smile not at the dreamer whowarns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and the other philosophers. Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intelt.
The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder. Ger thunder is of true German character. It is not very nimble, but rumbles along somewhat slowly. But come it will, and 'when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen." "Heine-the Jew who composed the greatest German poetry, and who fell in love with German philosophy-Heine wrote that," Slote said in a quieter tone. "He wrote that a hundred and six years ago."
Behind him chairs rasped, and a party in evening clothes, cheerily chattering in German, flanked by three bobbing, ducking waiters, came to the big table by the fire. Slote was jostled; glancing over his shoulder, he looked straight into the face of the Gestapo chief, who amiably smiled and bowed. With him was the man with the scarred forehead they had seen in the hotel, and another German with a shaved head, and three giggling Portuguese women in bright evening dresses.
"End of philosophy seminar," muttered Bunky Thurston.
"Why?" said Byron.
"Because for one thing," Natalie snapped, "I'm bored with it."
As the Germans sat down, conversation died throughout the restaurant. The Jews were looking warily toward them. In the lull, only the boisterous and oblivious British parties sounded louder.
'Who are those English people?" Natalie said to Thurston.
'Expatriates, living here because it's cheap and there's no rationingAlso, I guess, because it's out of range of Luftwaffe bombs," Thurston said. 'The British embassy staff isn't crazy about them."
'That's a remarkable quote from Heine," Byron said to Slote.
'I wrote a paper on Hegel and Heine at Oxford." Slote smiled thinly.
"Heine was fascinated by Hegel for a long time, then repudiated him. I translated that passage for an epigraph. The rhetoric is rather purple. So is Jeremiah's. Jewish prophets have one vein." As they were drinking coffee, a pink spotlight clove the dark room, striking a gray curtain on a little platform. Bunky Thurston said, "Here he comes. He's the best of the fado singers."
'The best of what?" Byron said. A pale dark-eyed young man, in a black cloak with thick fringes, stepped through the curtain holding an onion-shaped guitar.
"Fado singers. Fate songs. Very pathetic, very Portuguese."
At the first chords that the young man struck-strong sharp sad chords, in a hammering rhythm-the restaurant grew still. He sang in a clear high florid voice, looking around with his black eyes, his high bulging forehead pink in the spotlight. Natalie murmured to Thurston, "What song is that?" "That's an old one, the fado of the students."
'What do the words mean?"
Oh, the words never amount to anything. just a sentence or two.
That one says, 'Close your eyes. Life is simpler with your eyes closed."' The glance of the newlyweds met. Byron put his hand over Natalie's.
The young man sang several songs, with strange moments of speeding UP, slowing down, sobbing, and trilling; these evidently were the essence of fado, because when he performed such flourishes in the middle of a song, the Portugu in the room applauded and sometimes cheered.
"Lovely " Natalie murmured to Bunky Thurston when a song ended.
"Thank you." He smoothed his mustache with both hands. "I thought you'd find it agreeable. It's something different."
"Spielerl Kennen Sie 'O Sole Mio' singen?" The shaven-headed German was addressing the singer. He sat only a few feet from the platform.
Smiling uneasily, the singer replied in Portuguese, gesturing at his oddly shaped guitar, that he only performed fado songs. In a jolly tone, the German told him to sing "O Sole Mio" anyway. Again the young man made helpless gestures, shaking his head. The German pointed a smoking cigar at him, and shouted something in Portuguese that brought dead quiet in the restaurant, even among the British, and froze the faces of the three women at his table. With a piteous look around at the audience, the young performer began to do "O Sole Mio," very badly.
The German leaned back, beating time in the air with his cigar. A thick pall fell in the restaurant.
Natalie said to Thurston, "Let's leave now."
"I'm for that."
The singer was still stumbling through the Italian song as they walked out. On the counter at the entrance, under a picture of him, phonograph records in paper slipcovers were piled. "If that first song is there," Natalie said to Byron, "buy me a record."
He bought two.
The streetlights outside were brighter than the illumination in the restaurant, and the wind was cutting. Leslie Slote, tying a muffler around his neck, said to Byron, when do you leave?"
"Not till day after tomorrow."
'Years hence, the way I'm counting time," said Natalie with a note of defiance, hugging her husband's arm.
"Well, Natalie, shall I try to get us on a plane to Rome Saturday?"
"Oh, wait. Maybe he won't leave. I can always hope."
"Of course." Slote held out his hand to Byron. "If I don't see you again, congratulations, and good luck, and smooth sailing."
"Thanks. And thanks for that suite. It was brash of us to put you out of it."
"My dear fellow," said Slote, "it was quite wasted on me."
All her limbs jerking, Natalie woke from a nightmare of Gestapo men knocking at the door. She heard real knocking in the darkness.
She lay still, hoping that a trace of the nightmare was hovering in her fogged brain, and that the k
nocking would stop. It did not.
She looked at her luminous watch and touched Byron's warm hairy leg.
"Byron! Byron!"
He raised himself on an elbow, then sat up straight. "What time is it?"
"Quarter to two."
The knocking became faster and louder. Byron jumped from the bed and slipped into a robe.
"Briny, be careful about letting anyone in! First make sure who it is."
Natalie left the warm nest of the bed and was putting on a negligee, shivering in the chilly night air, when Byron opened the bedroom door.
"It's only Aster, so don't be scared."
"What does he want?"
that's what I'm finding out."
The door shut. Natalie went and leaned her ear against it, and heard Tobruk mentioned. Humiliated at having to eavesdrop, she rattled the knob and went in. The two young men rose from the sofa where they sat hunched in talk. Lieutenant Aster, in a blue and gold uniform and white peaked cap, was eating an apple.
"Hi, Natalie. This is one terrible thing to do, breaking in on honeymooners," he said cheerily. "Talk about extrahazardous duty!"
"What's the matter?"
Byron said, "Change of orders, nothing serious or urgent, no sweat 'Right. Matter of fact I was just shoving off." Lieutenant Aster dropped the apple core in a tray. "I have to round up some crew members that had overnights. It's going to be an interesting tour of Estoril and Lisbon after dark. See you, Byron."
With a grin at her, and a brief tip of his rakishly tilted hat, the lieutenant left.
"Well? Tell me." Natalie confronted her husband, arms folded.
Byron went to the red marble fireplace and touched a match to papers under a pile of kindling and logs. "The S-45 leaves this morning."
"This very morning, eh? Too bad. Where to?"
"I don't know. The fall of Tobruk has changed the mission-which to tell you the truth, I never exactly knew in the first place.
Something about surveying submarine facilities in the Mediterranean."
"Well. A-11 right. I guess I asked for this. My entire married life-as it may yet turn outut short by one third."
"Natalie, stir married life starts when you get back from Italy."
He put his arm around her and they stood watching the fire brighten.
"It's going to be very long, happy, and fruitful. I plan on six kids."
This made the young wife laugh through her gloom and put a hand to his face. "Oh lord. Six! I'll never last the course. jimmy, that fire feels Marvelous. Did we finish the wine before we went to sleep?
Look and see." He brought a glass of wine and lit a cigarette for her.
"Briny, one thing you should know. Back in November, Aaron was so sick he thought he might die. I had to take him to a specialist in Rome. It was a kidney stone. He lay in the Excelsior for two weeks, really in torture. Finally it cleared up, but one night, when he was very low, Aaron told me that he'd left everything he has to me. And he told me what it added up to. I was amazed." She smiled at him, sipping her wine. Byron looked at her with slitted eyes. "I guess he's sort of a miser, like most bachelors. That's one reason he moved to Italy. He can live handsomely there on very little.
Aaron's actually kept nearly all the money he made on A Jew's Jesus, and it brings in more every year. The book on Paul earned quite a bit too.
And before that he'd saved a lot of his professor's salary.
Living in Italy, he hasn't even,paid taxes. Aside from the value of his house, Aaron's worth more than a hundred thousand dollars. He lives just on his interest. The money is invested back in New York. I had no idea of any of this. Not the slightest. That he would leave anything to me never crossed my mind.
Nevertheless, that's how things stand." Natalie took Byron's chin in her hand and pushed it this way and that. 'What are you looking so grim about? I'm telling you you've married an heiress."
Byron poked a fallen red coal back into the fire. "Damn. He's really cute. Cuter than I thought."
"Are you being fair? Especially with your plan for six kids?"
"Possibly not." Byron shrugged. "Do you have enough money to get home with? You're coming home in two months, no matter what."
"I know. I agreed to that. I have plenty. Whew, that fire's beginning to scorch." She reclined on a couch before the blaze.
The negligee fell away, and the light played warmly on her smooth legs.
"Briny, does your family know you intended to get married?"
"No. No sense making trouble when I wasn't sure it would come off.
I did write Warren." 'Is he still in Hawaii?"
"Yes. He and Janice love it. I think you and I may well land there.
The Navy keeps beefing up the Pacific Fleet. Warren thinks we'll be fighting japan soon. That's the feeling all through the Navy."
"Not Germany?"
'No. It may sound strange to you, sitting here, but our people still don't get excited about Hitler. A few newspapers and magazines froth around, but that's about it."
He sat on the floor at her feet, looking at the fire, resting his head against her soft uncovered thigh. She caressed his hair.
"Exactly when do you leave, and how?"
"Lady's going to corue back for me at six."
"Six? Why, that's hours and hours. Big big chunk of our marriage left to enjoy. Of course you have to pack."
"Ten minutes."
"Can I go with you to the boat?"
"I don't see why not."
With a deep sigh, Natalie said, "Why are you sitting on the floor?
Come here."
There was no dawn. The sky turned paler and paler until it was light gray. Mist and drizzle hid the sea. Lieutenant Aster picked them up in a rattling little French car; the back seat was packed with four glum sailors smelling of alcohol and vomit. He drove with one hand, leaning far out to work a broken windshield wiper, keeping the accelerator on the floor.
The foggy road along the river was empty, and they reached Lisbon quickly.
The submarine was dwarfed by a very rusty tramp steamer berthed directly ahead, with an enormous Stars and Stripes painted on its side, an American flag flying, and the name Yankee Belle stencilled in great drippy white letters on bow and stern. Its grotesquely cut-up shape and crude revetted plating looked foreign, and thirty or forty years old.
It rode so high in the water that much of its propeller and mossy red bottom showed.
Jews lined the quay in the drizzle, waiting quietly to go aboard, most of them with cardboard suitcases, cloth bundles, and frayed clothes. The children-there were quite a number-stood silent, clinging to their parents. At a table by the gangway, two uniformed Portuguese officials, under umbrellas held by assistants, were inspecting and stamping papers. Policemen in rubber capes paced up and down the queue. The rail of the ship was black with passengers staring at the quay and the Lisbon bills, as freed prisoners look back at the jail to savor their liberty.
"When did that ocean greyhound show up?" Byron said.
"Yesterday morning. It's an old Polish bucket, and the crew are mostly Greeks and Turks," Aster said. "I've tried talking to them.
The pleasanter ones seem to be professional cutthroats. I gather the Jews will be packed in like sardines in five-decker bunks, for which they'll pay the price of deluxe suites on the Queen Mary. These fellows laughed like hell about that." He glanced at his wristwatch.
"Well, we cast off at 0715. Good-bye, Natalie, and good luck.
You were a beautiful bride, and now you're a beautiful Navy wife."
The exec stepped aboard, smartly returning the salute of the gangway watch. On the dock near the gangway, unmindful of the rain beginning to fall, a sailor was hugging and kissing a dumpy Portuguese trollop dressed in red satin. Byron held out his arms to his wife, with a glance at the sailor and a grin, She embraced him. "You fool.
Your trouble is, you went and married the creature."
"I was drunk," Byron said. He kissed her again and again
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Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 72