Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Thomas H. Cook

  Danforth would long recall the fervent nature of Christophe’s argument, his deep love for his Spanish comrades. But it was the suffering at the Spanish internment camps Christophe most powerfully described: the poor food and shelter, the anguish of their defeat and subsequent dispossession. It was a vision that Danforth found quite moving, though he saw almost no response to it in Anna’s eyes. Rather, she peppered Christophe with questions that were almost entirely logistical, as if her intent were not simply to make contact and later train and supply this ghostly army, but to lead it.

  “So,” Christophe said when Anna had asked the last of her questions, “the next step is that you go to Gurs, mademoiselle.”

  The arrangements were made the next day, and three days after that, Danforth and Anna set off from Paris on a southwestern journey through the heart of France that he found utterly exhilarating and that filled him with an inexpressible joy. He recognized that this happiness was fanciful and romantic, but he could not — even later, after all was known — strip this journey of its tingling pleasure or of the sense that he would never live higher or more passionately than he lived at that moment.

  At Urdos station, the mountain passes of the Atlantic Pyrenees loomed ahead, but Danforth found nothing ominous in their high, jagged walls. Oloron-Sainte-Marie lay before them, and a short time later they stood before the old doors of Sainte- Marie. It had been a smooth journey thus far, but also a long one, though Danforth didn’t feel in the least depleted by it. He was on the road again, like the boy of old, only this time destined to pursue a higher goal than the purchase of Etruscan pottery or an Afghan rug.

  “The Romans tramped through these ravines,” he told Anna. “These were the gates of Western Europe.”

  But on the road that day, there was only a group of pilgrims bound for Santiago de Compostela. They were a ragged assemblage, French peasants who seemed unchanged from the Middle Ages save for their clothes. The trudging of this ancient route was no doubt a powerful act of faith, and Danforth noticed a curious sympathy for them in Anna’s eyes; perhaps this ritualized Christian journey reminded her of the Hasidim of Delancey Street, the way they also went on foot to their sacred houses.

  Once the little group of pilgrims had passed, she turned idly toward the church doors, and Danforth saw that she was peering at the base of one of the church’s supporting columns: two medieval peasants, standing back to back, the great weight of the column on their small shoulders.

  “Peasants doing their duty,” Danforth said lightly. “Despite the burden, I mean.” He looked at them more closely. “Contented with their place in the chain of being.”

  Anna’s gaze remained on the two bent figures, their faces not at all strained as the vast weight pressed down upon them.

  “Oppression often looks like harmony,” she said.

  It was a remark that seemed to come from the darkest of her experiences, her expression as solemn as her voice, so entirely genuine that Danforth would for many years refuse to consider that it might have been a mask.

  “Monsieur?”

  Danforth turned to see a small, stooped figure standing just beyond the church door, his scruffy brown hat clutched in both hands, meekly, like a servant.

  “I Diego,” he said in deeply accented English.

  He was dressed raggedly, and Danforth, with his keen eye for such things, noticed every dangling thread and nodding button.

  “I show you camp,” Diego said.

  Danforth stepped forward and offered his hand, which Diego took in the shy, uncertain way of men abruptly dispossessed.

  “I’m Tom,” Danforth told him in Spanish. “And this is Anna.”

  “A pleasure,” Diego replied in his native tongue, with a quick bow toward Anna. “I have a car,” he said in Spanish, and he never again reverted to English. He motioned toward the small street that led away from the church. “Please come.”

  They followed Diego to a mud-splattered Renault that Danforth thought at least fifteen years old. The black exterior paint had long ago lost its gloss, and the running boards were caked with past generations of gray Pyrenean dust. It wheezed pitiably as the engine turned, and the chaise shook and rattled before it finally jerked forward, heaved backward, then bolted forward again in the comic way of silent movies. Danforth could almost imagine a bespectacled Harold Lloyd fearfully clutching its worn black steering wheel.

  “We should not go too close to the camp,” Diego said, “but you will see it very well.”

  The drive from Oloron-Sainte-Marie was brief, but on the way, Danforth noticed a few straggling French soldiers, their rifles held in the loose, jaunty way of stage actors as they marched raggedly southward. They had the beards and handlebar mustaches of the typical poulie, the type of soldier renowned since Napoleon, rustic, undisciplined and indisputably courageous, men who at Chemin des Dames had charged from their trenches contemptuously braying in loud and profoundly mocking imitation of sheep going to slaughter.

  “The guards get drunk,” Diego said scornfully as the old Renault jostled past a knot of laughing soldiers. “But we Spanish, we have nowhere to go, so we stay behind the wire.”

  “But you escaped,” Anna said.

  “Yes, I escaped,” Diego said wearily. “For two months I ate grass and snow. Then an old woman took me in. She lives high in the mountains.” He laughed. “A crazy old thing. Very nice, but crazy. She said to me . . . in French, she said, ‘Combien des Louis maintenent?’ She made a big joke. ‘How many Louises have there been?’” He laughed again. “She thought there were still kings in France.”

  Diego was a careful driver, but the Renault was anything but compliant, and with the slip and slide of the muddy road, it occasionally veered violently to the left or right, making Danforth and Anna collide in its cramped back seat, each time with a little laugh, and, for Danforth, a small electric thrill at her touch.

  Later it would seem to Danforth the height of solipsism that he had felt no dread as he approached the transit camp at Gurs. In fact, he had felt only the continuing elation of their recent journey; he was still adrift in its intrigue but more keenly aware of the physical nearness of Anna and of the increasingly intense nature of the experience they were to share.

  Afloat in that phantasm, he scarcely felt the old Renault grind to a halt and barely heard Diego’s whispered “Through the trees.”

  Diego went to the trees and motioned them forward and down, so they were in a low crouch by the time they reached him. Anna got out first, but Danforth had joined her by the time she got to the trees. “Six thousand now,” Diego said, “but every day it gets bigger.” He pointed. “There.”

  Years later, in the midst of his own dark search, Danforth would see a grainy black-and-white photo of the camp taken from the water tower by a camera aimed straight into the bowels of the site. It would appear quite expansive in the photograph, with column after column of wooden barracks that reached as far as the eye could see. In that picture, Gurs had seemed as large as Auschwitz when he’d later walked those bleak grounds, still searching for a clue as to how it had all happened, and where he had gone wrong.

  But on the day he first set eyes on Gurs, Danforth could make out little beyond a scattering of ramshackle barracks hammered together from what appeared to be thin plywood sheets covered with tar paper, a muddy little shantytown that reminded him of the Hoovervilles back home. Captured like a school of fish within its barbed-wire net, the defeated Spaniards seemed defeated indeed, not an army at all, despite what Christophe had said, but a weak rabble, the lost brigade of an equally lost cause.

  “No running water,” Diego said. He shook his head. “Others are worse. Saint-Cyprien. Ninety thousand there. Right on the Mediterranean. They have nothing.” He shrugged. “Les Rouges a côté de la mer,” he said sadly in French. “The Reds beside the sea.”

  They didn’t linger for very long after that, Diego clearly jumpy and eager to leave. He was, after all, a fugitive, and if captured he would be ret
urned to Gurs or, worse, sent back to Spain, where he would no doubt be either executed or imprisoned.

  Back in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, he quickly bid them adieu, and a few minutes later Danforth and Anna went to have dinner at a small restaurant, after which they boarded the night train back to Paris.

  “What do you think of the Spanish?” Danforth asked.

  “I think that if war comes, they will fight,” Anna answered.

  In this, as Danforth would later learn, she had been right. When war did come, the Spanish blew up bridges and sabotaged factories and even managed to kill General von Schaumburg, the German commandant of the region around Paris.

  But at the time, Danforth did not know any of this, and the logistics of helping to provision an army of displaced Spaniards seemed daunting, to say the least.

  Even so, he said, “We have lots of plans to make.”

  “Yes, we do,” Anna said.

  And so it had seemed to Danforth that together they would take the next step in the Project, as planned: establish a network within the camps, find secret storage facilities, arrange for the clandestine provision of this most ill-equipped of armies — details that made clear the importance of their many languages.

  All of this, Danforth fully expected them to do.

  But they never did.

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “Never did?” I asked.

  “No,” Danforth said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  My question appeared to strike him like an infinitely thin blade; rather than answer it, he said, “Tell me, Paul, have you ever heard of Chekhov’s hammer?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Chekhov said that at the door of every happy person, there should be someone tapping with a little hammer, just as a reminder, soft but steady, that there are unhappy people in the world.”

  He saw that I didn’t get his point.

  “On the train back to Paris, I was happy,” Danforth said. “I felt that Anna and I were now true comrades in arms. We had just completed a little investigatory mission and were about to begin the further implementation of the Project. I envisioned this as a long process, with many dramatic turns. Anna would teach me the skills she’d learned at Winterset. We would teach these same skills to various contacts. We would be secret agents. We would live lives of intrigue in service to our shared cause.” He smiled. “Youth is life’s chief deceiver, Paul, and its chief deception is that you will somehow escape the common fate.” The smile withered. “At that moment, with this vision circling in my head, I should have heard that little hammer. Because these would be the last days I would be without suspicion or look forward without fear.”

  He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and produced a cable encased in plastic, preserved as if it were a rare document. He handed it to me.

  It was dated May 21, 1939, and it was from Clayton. He was in London, where he’d encountered “some urgent business problems.” Danforth and Anna were to meet him there as quickly as they could book passage. He was staying at the Savoy. In the meantime, they were to “take care.”

  “Well, what do you make of that, Paul?” Danforth asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. I handed it back to him.

  “It wouldn’t cause you any alarm?”

  “About what?”

  “Clayton? That he might be a traitor.”

  “No,” I said, quite confidently. “Why would it cause me to doubt Clayton?”

  “You’re right; it wouldn’t, of course,” Danforth said. “It wouldn’t cause any alarm having to do with a specific person. But in a vague way, it might make you begin to doubt everything. It might produce a sense of things perhaps being not quite right. I mean, just what are these ‘urgent business problems’ about which Anna and I should ‘take care’? You would not doubt Clayton or anyone else. But you would suddenly feel . . . on trembling ground.” He smiled.

  “That is the sinister art of deceit, Paul,” he said. “To make things unclear, to allow for multiple interpretations. It’s very effective at disorienting even the most experienced of conspirators, because more than anything, the conspirator seeks certainty. If he is certain he is discovered, he will act accordingly, probably by getting the hell out of town. If he is certain that he is not discovered, he will act accordingly, stay put and carry on with his plot. But when he is truly unsure if he is or is not discovered, he will be in a constant state of fearful disequilibrium. He will sleep, this uncertain conspirator, but he will do it fitfully, and his judgment will be clouded by this lack of rest. He will sleep but this sleep will exhaust and debilitate him and fill his mind with unsettled thoughts and unfounded fears. He will sleep, but only as we wish him to sleep, warily.” His smile was as lupine as the thing he said: “It is called the sleep of wolves.” He returned the cable to his jacket pocket. “We left for London the next day.”

  Paris, France, 1939

  But they had dinner on the boulevard Raspail the night before they left for London, and while they ate, Danforth told Anna how his father had taught him to be wily and observant. Watch for the unseen, he had told him, and listen for the unsaid.

  He hoped, he said, that he had learned those lessons well.

  “They are useful lessons,” Anna said, and added nothing else.

  After dinner, he walked her to her door, where they parted with a long, close embrace that Danforth found curiously exciting, as if he’d received a jolt of energy, one that lingered long after and finally kept him from sleep. Eventually he rose and headed out into the street.

  It had rained earlier in the evening, and now a few soggy papier-mâché remnants of some sort of patriotic celebration hung heavily from balconies and trees. Posters memorializing a glorious past bowed from dripping kiosks, and it seemed to Danforth that all around the city, there was a sense that only the past could be celebrated, because what lay ahead for France, and perhaps for the world, was utterly uncertain.

  The windows of the shops were dark, but even in the shadows Danforth could see how much style still mattered to the French. In a bakery, it was in the blush on little marzipan peaches. In a boutique, it was a dress with an impudent ruffl e. In a gift shop, a decorative box tied with lace. These small gestures stood against the encroaching doom, Danforth thought, but at the same time he wondered if this was all that stood against it.

  Surely not, he decided, and in a kind of reverie he imagined a vastly extended web of heroic conspirators, an army of courageous men and women who passed notes in Viennese cafés and exchanged signals on the Ponte Vecchio. In Budapest they hid crates of arms and loaded them into little boats and sailed them to cadres waiting along the Danube. Other arms came ashore at Marseille or Dubrovnik and were taken far inland by railway car or covered with hay and borne by horse-drawn wagons into the heart of Prague. Surely in Copenhagen and Oslo, and from Calais to Trieste, there were brave men and women who thought of nothing but how this dark tide must be stopped. Surely, Danforth declared to himself, surely at some illuminating moment not far in the future, the blustering Prince of Darkness would confront a rifle behind every blade of grass.

  This was not an illusion he could long sustain, however, and by the time he returned to his apartment, his fantasy of a sweeping pan-European resistance had died a dog’s death, and dawn found him by the window, peering out over the boulevard, wondering if he and Anna could still carry out their mission if Clayton’s “urgent business matters” proved more perilous than he’d supposed, or if Clayton himself — the unsettling possibility suddenly struck him — was something other than he seemed.

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “Other than he seemed?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Clayton other than he seemed,” I repeated, now no less unsettled than Danforth had been so many years before. “So that cable had made you suspect that he might be a traitor?”

  “That night, as I was standing at the window, yes, that thought did occur to me,” Danfort
h answered. “But not because of anything I actually knew about Clayton. It was more general than that, and it was very vague. Later, I would come to believe that life itself — when you look it in the eye — is a treacherous thing. It isn’t out to break our hearts, as the Irish say. It’s out to leave us baffl ed and confused, to strip us of any faith we might have in anyone, even ourselves. That’s what life really is, Paul, a wearing down of trust.”

  For the first time, Danforth appeared profoundly weathered, a landscape raked by wind and rain, part of him deeply furrowed, part of him smoothed and softened.

  “It can make a man murderous,” he added. “It can make a man reach for a pistol on a warm tropical day.”

  Then I saw it for the second time, the quiet capacity Danforth had for violence, how steady it would be, how carefully calculated and reasonably carried out, the way he would kill.

  Some hint of this insight surely appeared in my gaze at that moment, because Danforth reacted to it in a way I’d not seen before. Retreat. It seemed to me he had gotten ahead of himself and knew it, and now he forced himself to step back and back and back, until we arrived in London.

  The Savoy, London, 1939

  “They once flooded the lobby, you know,” Clayton said in what struck Danforth as a strained effort at his old gaiety. “They filled it with water, and the patrons floated in little gondolas.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to imagine now,” he added. “Such . . . frivolity.”

  Danforth found Clayton’s uncharacteristic solemnity worrisome. It was clearly a sign that certain things weren’t going well, though in what way they weren’t going well remained obscure. One thing was obvious, however. Clayton was no longer enjoying his role as lead conspirator; as he sat in suit and tie, dressed as perfectly as ever, he seemed like a portrait darkening at the edges.