1938
Kaufman had telephoned again to check on the baron’s condition. Then he asked that I stop by his office.
“I’ve my schedule in front of me. Be here at four o’clock, please. I can see you at four o’clock.”
I doubted he was as busy as this sounded. The baron had been Kaufman’s principal client, and the baron no longer had much property to administer and very few legal rights left to defend. And Kaufman was no longer permitted to call himself a lawyer—but still kept his office, the drowsy rooms where I used to work. Grouchy Frau Fleck was still his secretary, though I can’t imagine what there was for her to do.
And Kaufman kept me waiting half an hour, for no reason I can think of other than that he did not wish me to forget I’d once been his lowly part-time office boy.
When I was at last admitted to his presence, he didn’t invite me to sit down. I sat down anyway. He arched his eyebrows.
Kaufman always was a difficult man to like. He had courage, all right, but he was also an old-fashioned Prussian Rechtsanwalt with several pins up his ass.
“I must warn you there is to be a criminal investigation of this incident at Walden,” Kaufman said without preamble. “The police are quite serious about it, apparently.”
“The police are actually going to do something? I must say I’m surprised.”
“The target of their investigation is, of course, the baron.”
“How do you mean?”
“A matter of criminal trespass,” Kaufman said calmly.
“More than that, surely. It’s at least a case of attempted murder.”
Kaufman steepled his fingers and stared at me. “You don’t hear me, sir,” he said softly. “The individual under investigation is the Baron von Weinbrenner. They are indeed weighing whether this is a case of criminal trespass. If they conclude it is, then Weinbrenner will be charged as the trespasser. They’ve served him a notice of eviction, which, against my advice, he completely disregarded.”
“But he’s paying enormous rent—”
“He is no longer in a position to do so. And the city of Frankfurt has chosen to terminate the arrangement. The authorities emphasize he has no legal right to remain in occupancy. They consider it a serious matter, and there will be fines, though God knows what they think they can squeeze from him. In short: he’ll have to vacate Haus-Walden.”
There was nothing to do with that sort of news except swallow it and try not to choke.
In the silence I became aware of the sound of city traffic, never so violent as Berlin’s, but the hum of an active city all the same. It sounded so healthy and normal.
“I pray he dies,” Kaufman said. “Because the alternative is not good. I pray my old patron dies in his own bed and very soon.”
When I left, he shook hands with me, for the first time ever. Frau Fleck offered only her usual scowl.
My parents came out again that afternoon and acted overjoyed when the baron seemed to swim up out of his morphia haze and utter a few sounds that might have been words. Their jubilation irritated me. They were fooling themselves. It was another edition of what was happening all over Frankfurt: denial of reality.
Then the snake uncoiled, and the old man began twisting and writhing. It took my father and me to hold him down while Karin delivered another injection, and during those shocking moments while the baron writhed and screeched and shat himself, my parents could no longer ignore the reality of the situation.
They rode back to Bad Homburg in Otto’s taxi. My parents normally never took taxis, but they had only a few hours free, and there was no easy way to travel by tram. He probably gave them a break on the fare.
“In Zürich,” Karin said, “it should be possible to find the right doctor.”
We were in the kitchen, with Herta, warming by the stove, drinking coffee. Outside there was a lacquer of early snow on the ground. The kitchen was warmer than the library, smelled better, too.
“Well,” I said, “I believe Swiss doctors like to be paid.”
“Listen, you can’t tell me anything I don’t know about Swiss doctors. When I was at school in Lausanne there was one fellow, very good at setting bones, but all he wanted was to get a hand up your skirt. But they know their broken bones, the Swiss.”
I told her she wasn’t facing facts, and facts had to be faced, because the SS Volendam was scheduled to sail from Rotterdam for New York in fewer than five days. I’m sure I spoke brutally. I felt trapped. Sixty milliliters. Pushed in quickly. That was what Dr. Lewin had said.
She telephoned Kaufman once more, and he must have drenched even more cold water over the Zurich idea, because she did not mention it again.
It was getting colder. Winter was on the way. I scoured the house for extra rugs and blankets and a set of moth-eaten curtains and brought what I found down to the library for us to sleep on or under. I built up the fire so it would burn a couple of hours without being tended.
“Your father is dying.” I was working on the fire and looked around to see her lean over the baron, tucking in his blankets. He was asleep, if you could call it sleep. Really it was just the opiate.
“We’re all dying,” she said.
We arranged our pallet bed near the fire and lay spooned together. I put my arm around her. She was shivering that night. Winter was definitely moving in, and the fire wasn’t enough. Every time a branch rattled a window or knocked against the roof tiles, or a truck hooted out on the road, I could feel her flinch. Sometime in the middle of the night we awakened and made love, rather roughly. I don’t know why these things come as they do—the poison gas of fear spills out as passion. Maybe I was trying to cover my fear with excitement. Maybe she was, too. Perhaps death hovering in the room, breathing down our necks, was an aphrodisiac. We made this strenuous love and fell back asleep glued to each other, but just before sleep I felt wholly aware and wholly conscious of my attachment to her and my responsibility for her safety, and this awareness filled my body like an active thing.
A couple of hours later I woke with a start. Heart pounding. In my dream I had been falling down a well. I sat up suddenly, the gorge of panic in my throat.
Ever since the assault we’d shared a mostly unspoken fear that the stormtroopers would return, though it was difficult to imagine what they could possibly want, because there was so little left at Walden. Pleasure in desecration—maybe that was motive enough. Fantasies of buried Hebrew treasure. Setting woods on fire, burning out the Jewish ghosts, Irish ghosts, ghosts of famous racehorses.
Karin was kneeling in front of the fireplace. The fire was nearly out and she had on her tweed overcoat over a nightdress and was trying to get a blaze going.
Her father was snoring. Deep opiate snores. He sounded like a clown pretending to snore, exaggerating for laughs, but it was no joke. He was still insensible on the last injection she had given him before turning in. I glanced at my watch. Four o’clock in the morning. Dark outside. Sudden, violent whips of rain slashed on the windows.
The decision had made itself while we slept. Maybe our bodies’ entanglement made things plain. Bodies have crying needs.
The bearish smell in the library was grim. A November storm was definitely blowing in, rain beginning to clatter at the windows. I got up, pulled on clothes, and went to the bookshelf where we kept the morphine. Assembling a hypodermic I tried to concentrate on what my hands were doing, and nothing else, as I filled the syringe.
It’s how such things are done: methodically, step-by-step; pay attention to procedure, keep the mind as cold and clear as the bleb of an icicle.
Her father lay snorting in his morphine catacomb.
I was prepared to do it, but at the last moment she took the hypodermic from my hands. And I let her.
She’d been delivering four or five or six injections every day. She was practiced at it; she had the technique. Even when the snake was writhing and striking she was expert at finding a vein.
With him asleep it was much easier.
We didn’t speak. Nothing to say. She punched in the needle and pushed the dose through quickly. And he never made a sound. Afterward we sat at opposite ends of the window seat, only our feet touching, leafing through her old Winnetous, which the monsters had left behind.
BEST WESTERN
In the fall of 1977 I had a new book out and was invited to deliver a talk at Texas Tech, in Lubbock. No wine or liquor of any sort was provided at lunch at the faculty club, and this made me grumpy. A graduate student drove me back to my perfectly adequate but dispiriting Best Western motel. I wasn’t flying until the next morning, and I found myself in the middle of El Llano Estacado with an afternoon to spare.
The desk clerk was able to have a rental car delivered right to the motel. I set off, driving somewhat aimlessly but in general heading for New Mexico.
By then I’d experienced el llano on countless visits, but those had always been purposeful quests, research trips, often with graduate students. I’d usually have a rigorous schedule of interviews set up with Apache, old XIT cowboys, oilmen, cotton farmers, academics. Once I’d tagged along with a vanload of doctoral candidates on a field trip: we set up camp near the Clovis Man site in New Mexico, and we hiked every trail in Palo Duro Canyon State Park.
El Llano Estacado was in many ways a distressed, even broken, country. Within a few decades of the Comanche’s defeat, it had been fatally overgrazed. During World War I, with prices high, the land was planted in wheat and, after wheat prices collapsed, in cotton. During the thirties there was terrible drought: el llano was close to ground zero of the Dust Bowl. After the Second World War the Ogallala Aquifer was plumbed, and then the land was overirrigated and fed massive doses of chemical fertilizers. The conurbations of Amarillo and Lubbock with their shopping malls, airbases, and interstate highways sprawled out over the ex-grassland.
Of course el llano was never “untouched.” Like any landscape, it had always been changing. In the eighteenth century Spanish horses caused a massive shift in the ecosystem and jump-started the Comanche empire. But by the middle of the twentieth century, with metastasizing cities and subsidized, unsustainable agriculture, el llano was being treated like a machine whose owners were determined to squeeze the last bit of work from it before tossing it on the junk heap.
That was the real llano, which for decades I had visited, mapped, photographed, interrogated, written about. The place my life’s work centered on. But there was always el llano constructed in our minds—a dream of bareness, boundlessness, and light.
For the rest of the afternoon I did nothing but drive. There’s no better way to take on that landscape than with a car or, better yet, one of those rugged Comanche ponies that nourished themselves on cacti.
Heading west, I put nearly two hundred miles on my rental Chevrolet, past dirty gray cotton fields and thousands of acres of once-pasture with not a whisker of grass on it, only crumbly gray soil and taut barbed wire.
I knew the country so well by then that even at seventy miles per hour I could see it, feel it, and derive solace from it, without really looking at anything but the blacktop straight ahead.
Plenty of travelers have left their bones on el llano. It can seem endless, but of course it isn’t. If you can keep going, you’ll find water, food, shade, on the other side.
I drove in a kind of numbness that day. I felt her presence, especially as I came nearer the New Mexico state line. The clutter of oil derricks, irrigation gear, and cotton fluff thinned out, and the land became stark.
El llano is perfectly level to the eye but in fact slopes upward to the west, though not by much. A meter or so per mile. It seems higher out that way because it’s even more bare and empty; it feels closer to the sky. There’s not much there but wind, barbed wire, sunlight. Featureless, you might say. It’s the sort of country where pilgrims lose their way.
With her I was always in someone else’s film. I wasn’t writing the screenplay, wasn’t the star, wasn’t the Llano Kid. Maybe I was Gary Cooper’s horse, or the western wind. Maybe the light. Maybe the red bluffs. Maybe the horizontal yellow, maybe the distance, maybe emptiness, maybe the no-place-to-hide.
In the hamlet marked as Grady, New Mexico, on my Avis road map, there was a tiny post office and an elementary school. Some crumbling adobe walls were all that remained of the tourist court where we’d spent our last night.
I had crossed and recrossed el llano many times since then but never had revisited those particular ruins. No good reason to.
And still there wasn’t. I had planned to take a walk across the fields, but I didn’t even get out of the car. I peered at the stumps of adobe walls for a few moments, then powered the window shut, swung the car around, and headed back to Lubbock. The next morning I boarded my flight for Chicago, and home to Toronto.
Next to the bleak grandeur of its emptiness, nothing installed by human hands has ever amounted to much on el llano.
1938
Holograph on paper fragment. Signed “K,” undated, no envelope, no postmark. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1938. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.
Mein lieber William!
I’m sorry sorry but really I cannot stay.
Don’t feel correct.
What there is to come and don’t have strength for it.
Just not myself.
Very tired.
Take good care of yourself, my dear brother.
Your love,
K
Our first night out of Germany, in a hotel room almost on the Holland-America quay at Rotterdam, I remember her mixing martinis with Dutch genever gin and talking about a plot she’d heard of back in UFA days. An actor’s plan to assassinate Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring at a movie premiere.
“Be careful what you say, Karin. Who knows, maybe the walls are listening.”
“This is a free city.”
“Yes, well, I don’t know about that. My parents are still in Germany.”
“Give me a cigarette, damn you. I won’t smoke these German weeds anymore. I wish you’d go out and get us some Dutch cigarettes. I can’t smoke this Nazi tobacco.”
The instant freedom and safety we’d won by crossing the Dutch frontier felt dishonorable to her, a swank and phony pose. We were safe merely because we carried the right passports. All we’d needed to get ourselves clear of dear old Germany was a ticket on a fast, comfortable train.
Genever packs more of a punch than English gin. She kicked off her shoes and lay on the bed, lighting a cigarette and gazing at the ceiling. “Damn cold in here, William Cody.”
“I shall run you a bath.”
“Baths cost extra.”
“Hot bath, two guilders, we can manage it.”
“No. Go fetch us some Dutch cigarettes.”
“Let’s get you into a bath first.”
The bathroom was down the hallway. I paid our landlady two guilders, and she ran the hot bath. In our room Karin was dozing, cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I led her to the bath, and while I was scrubbing her back she read aloud extracts from narratives written by people who’d traveled across El Llano Estacado, dire warnings mostly.
A contingent of American college boys was sailing for home on the SS Volendam. Amherst College, Williams College, the University of Virginia. Six boys who’d been studying together at Heidelberg had formed a jazz band; they called themselves the Calamitous Collegians, and they knew how to swing. There was a very hot trumpet player, a short fat fellow from the state of Maine, who could blow a solo or two that reached with fingers into the heart and made life seem round, not flat. And their drummer was superb. He could get the stolid Dutch deck officers jitterbugging. Another boy, slight, dark Italian American, could sing rather well; he had a supple bluesy growl and a sort of phrasing I’d never heard before that brought the song close. One afternoon at a tea dance in the tourist-class lounge he gave us a version of “Here and Now,” the first time I heard what became a standard:
T
his night’s a chance I’m taking
A long-lost dream,
I’m waking
Only to offer myself to you
It was unexpected, and extraordinarily moving, to hear such a blues in the middle of the ocean. It seemed a bittersweet promise from America: life was risky, life was tough, but at least it was life, not death, that was on offer now.
The Calamitous Collegians were fans of Ellington, you could tell, and Benny Goodman. A lively and accomplished dance band. It was hard to imagine anyone jitterbugging in Heidelberg, which hadn’t struck me as a swinging town. But my associations with the place were unpleasant, excepting the moments with Lily on the hillside above the Neckar, which had retained their vivacity.
There weren’t so many young women aboard the ship, and all the college boys wanted to dance with Karin. She loved it.
Young people drank a lot in those days. Some of it was in competition with one another, a kind of race, also considered a test of character. You were supposed to put away a lot of booze without showing it so much. You might show it a little bit, that was acceptable, it was “grace under pressure.” It was quite okay to be “tight,” to be “a couple of sheets to the wind”; it made people looser, more relaxed, sometimes even a bit wiser.
Karin had her clear-cold martinis at Frankie’s English Bar, but she’d sipped them very slowly, two drinks to last the whole evening. Liquor was never a focus for her. But those days at sea, there was a great deal of stress. That’s what it’s called now—stress. Then it didn’t have a name, or not one I knew. Then it was just a powerful, uncomfortable—even shameful—set of feelings. Unspeakable, literally. It felt a lot like being a coward. It felt a lot like being a bore.
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