The Trespassers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  The other only shrugged once more.

  “Listen. Christa will be at the Karl Hof in Basel. If you change your mind and wish help—whatever help other refugees can give—write her there. She will know where to find me, in case we are separated.”

  He left then, pocketing the signed document Schneirmann had given him. When he reached home, he found the house in turmoil. Suitcases, trunks, packing cases of every size stood about, half packed. Books, manuscript, even sheet music and bound volumes of music were piled up, waiting. Skis stood in one corner of the hallway, the two long pair, a medium pair for Paul, and the small runners for Ilse. There were tennis rackets too, ice skates, and sitting in forlorn isolation on the settee in the living room were Ilse’s family of dolls, six of them, in all sizes, ranged primly side by side, waiting. The spaniel, Hansi, raced about in a bright frenzy of anticipation.

  Franz almost laughed in his first despairing glimpse of the complete misunderstanding in this household of what flight actually meant.

  Paul and Ilse came rushing toward him.

  “My bicycle, Father, I’ll need it, and yet Mommy says—” Paul’s eyes were gleaming with excitement. So he looked each June during the preparations for going to their country place. Ilse was shoving herself in front of Paul, eager to get attention for her problems.

  “And I couldn’t leave Gretchen or Nina or Trudy home for so long, Daddy,” she begged, as if they had already argued the matter for some time. “They would get so lonely. I—”

  Christa came to him. She threw out both her hands to indicate the rooms strewn with their belongings, all the big and little parts of their life, memory, shared experiences. She looked confused, unhappy.

  “And my camera—what about that, and the stamp album?” Paul was saying. “I just simply couldn’t think of leaving—”

  “Please tell Mommy, the doll carriage, the big one, not that little old straw thing—” Ilse’s voice was tense with pleading.

  “And what do you think, Father?” Paul went on, his voice heavy with young and amused irony. “Mommy even said we’d have to ask you about taking Hansi. We could never leave Hansi behind.”

  How make children understand that all the hundred precious things, the beloved landmarks of normal and sheltered childhood, were to be abandoned? He and Christa had decided not to tell them too soon of what lay ahead; to guard them for as long as possible from the news that might be more difficult for them than adults knew. Now he had to try to explain and prepare them at least in part. They must not, later, feel that they had been fooled or betrayed.

  “Here, here, what’s all this you’re asking me?” he said to both upturned, searching, faces. “Come and let’s talk this over a minute.”

  He started for his small study, and the two children danced in behind him. They were in high, prancing spirits—a vacation in Switzerland was real adventure, more fun even than going to the Traunsee.

  Dr. Vederle sat down and Ilse climbed to his knee. Paul threw himself on the rug and began emptying out an unbelievable assortment of things from his pockets.

  “Listen to me, you monkeys,” Vederle began. “This is the time for us to have a very grown-up talk.”

  The children unknowingly straightened up, suddenly watchful of his face and voice. Paul abandoned the small pile of possessions on the rug before him. Ilse twisted about to look into his face.

  “I want to explain a little about your trip.” His tone fitted the easy, casual mood he wished to create for them. “You see, children, this isn’t going to be the same as all the other trips you’ve taken. This is more important.”

  “How—why? Do you mean longer?” Paul asked.

  Franz nodded.

  “It’s to Switzerland, yes—but that’s only the first part.”

  “Where, Daddy, oh, hurry, where are we going—to France? Italy?”

  “Italy is where they give red wine to the babies,” Ilse put in surprisingly. Vederle laughed.

  “No, not France or Italy. Much more interesting than that. How would you like to get on a great big ocean liner—”

  “You mean—to America? Are—we—going—?” Paul’s voice was large and deep with awe. He had heard so much, read so much, about that strange country.

  “Yes, that’s really where. Oh, not right away, of course. First you want to have some fun in Switzerland—”

  Paul’s eyes were shining. But suddenly Ilse’s arms were tight around her father’s neck. She was pressing herself to him, her face hot against his cheek.

  “Oh, no, Daddy, please, please, no. I don’t want to go there. I want to stay right here. Oh, please—”

  She was not crying. Her chin and lips fought against the quivering that beset them, her arms pressed tighter. “I don’t want to go there—” And again he was at the station, hearing little Editha Wolff’s voice cry out against her unnamable fear. The first time a child meets fear, feels slipping out of its grasp all that is safe and known…

  He remembered so well how it could be once when he was no more than five, no bigger than this frightened little Ilse, he had been roused from sleep by his mother in the middle of the night.

  There was a fire blazing near the city’s gas supply, and the alarm had gone out—it was possible the great gas tanks might explode. He had been rushed into some clothes, half blind and staggering with the reluctant and stubborn sleepiness of a little boy; with his mother and father, he had gone running forth into the streets, to get as far as possible from the neighborhood.

  They were the same streets he knew, that he played on and walked on. Yet he was never to forget the terrible quality of strangeness, because it was the middle of the night, because a lurid half-light glowed in the sky from the great fire beyond the houses, because—just because this was new, different, monstrous. He wanted only to reach out to his father, to his mother, to climb into somebody’s lap and hide his head and cry to them to stop all this Thing that was happening. But they were half walking, half running, and he had to go with them. Soon he heard his own sobbing voice in the air in front of him; he hadn’t meant to behave badly; he loathed himself for being a crybaby, but he simply could not check the awful feeling in his heart.

  He remembered hearing his mother say, “Carry him, the poor child is tired,” and that then he was scooped up into his father’s arms and held against his shoulder, his own small knees hooked up against his father’s plump and comfortable stomach. He remembered, as if the memory were still somewhere in the muscles of his arms, how his small-boy’s arms had gone tight around his father’s neck, clinging, hanging to him as if to some God-given safety.

  And here was little Ilse with her first fear. No menacing sky casting a fearful glare, no rushing through newly strange, nighttime streets—but a child’s terror was the same, whatever the cause. The very absence of tears told him that she was feeling no everyday kind of misery.

  “Why don’t you cry, if you like?” he suggested quietly to her. “If you feel so badly, you can cry, you know, a little girl like you.”

  She looked up at him, searching, and he smiled down at her. He had never talked that way about crying before, really he never seemed to notice one way or another before, as though it didn’t matter. He certainly never made fun of crying, the way other children’s fathers did. Something went all easy inside her, and she put her face back into his big shoulder and cried, and cried, but even that seemed all easy. Her arms went soft, the hard feeling left them, and she felt she had never loved this father so much and if he wanted them to go to another country, it was all right.

  Paul had been patient, waiting. Now he began questioning again, and Franz explained as clearly as he thought he should. After a moment, Ilse’s weeping edged off into long, indrawn sobs and then quieted completely.

  “It’s something that happens to very many people,” Vederle was saying, “that they decide for some reason to move from one house to another, or one city to another, and sometimes even from one country to another. Only when they move t
o another country, then they usually stay there much longer. That’s what we may do. We may come back here to Döbling before very long, or it may be that we shall stay in America instead, for a long time. We might like it there too much to want to leave, ever.”

  “But my English is so very bad,” Paul said. “At school, the teacher—”

  Christa came in as Paul was speaking.

  “Your English is better than mine,” she said to him. “I envy you—and Father, who speaks it all the time to his American or British patients. But yours will be even better than his in a few months.”

  “And I will learn, too?” Ilse asked. “Will I speak English, too?”

  Vederle laughed.

  “We’ll all speak English. Now let’s hurry with the packing. You may take along only the most precious toys—only the small ones. Bicycles and doll carriages are too big.”

  He hesitated. Was it wiser to avoid the issue of Hansi? Or kinder to settle it at once?

  “And we’ll put Hansi to board with Aunt Maria until we come back.”

  “Oh, Father, no, oh, we couldn’t—”

  That was Paul. Ilse said nothing; she ran to Hansi, flung herself down beside him, clutched him to her so passionately that he squealed and struggled.

  “Yes, we must; I’m so awfully sorry. You know dogs are not allowed to travel in some countries, and even where they are allowed, they have to go in a small, tight box or cage with the trunks. Poor Hansi would be so uncomfortable and alone—”

  Long after the children were in bed, exhausted by the strange excitements of the day, Christa and Franz were still channeling all their thoughts, their energies, to the task of their own packing. They talked almost not at all; over their hurried supper, he had told her about the visit to the Consulate, his tickets for the plane, her tickets for the night train tomorrow. She had merely nodded, not surprised except over details. It was better to leave Vienna separately of course, the departure would not look like permanent emigration. If all went well they would meet in Basel, in three days. The affidavits could be sent there instead. There was an American Consulate there and at Zurich; the visas could be issued at almost any branch of the American Foreign Service.

  Beyond these timetable matters, these mundane arrangements of trains, addresses, schedules, they each withdrew into silence. Such upheaval was too grave to be verbalized easily. It was better to suppress one’s emotions as one tore down one’s past.

  It was nearly three in the morning when they approached the end. Two large trunks and four suitcases stood ready for their locks. One large canvas duffel bag, spilling out sports equipment from its top, was to be taken also; at the very bottom of this innocent-visaged vehicle were Vederle’s printed manuscripts and his still unfinished work. His great medical library, which included not only the standard reference works every good doctor has, but also a unique, complete collection of every major paper, pamphlet, report, and book on his own field of psychoanalysis—that would have to stay behind.

  Their other books, their Bechstein piano, their furniture, pictures, china, linens, all the beloved and slow accumulations of their thirteen years together as man and wife—these were all to be left untouched.

  They would remain where they now were, on their shelves, in their cabinets, in their corners—a house to which the owners were soon returning. Only after the four Vederles were actually on the Atlantic was the second half of the removal to be attempted. Then, if all had gone smoothly, Christa’s aunt would hire workmen to crate, and express companies to ship, the contents of the house, and put the house itself up for rent or sale. But only then.

  Spent emotionally and physically from the hours behind them, Franz and Christa finally sat wearily together in the living room. All that remained was to pack the single suitcase he would take on the airplane. They sat apart from each other, their minds still too occupied with the minutiae of decisions about what must be left, what taken, to be able to reach toward each other.

  Suddenly Christa was sobbing. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she bent her face to her hands and was crying. She sat bolt upright, rigid except for the crying which shook her.

  “I can’t, Franz, we mustn’t,” she began. “It is not your fault, I do not blame you for thinking I wished this too—I let you cable her without understanding what it would be—”

  He stood up and came toward her. But he stopped a few feet away, listening to the words pouring forth between the concealing palms over her mouth. Between the spread fingers, he could see her eyes, tight closed in this violent rejection.

  “For a long time, you knew that I did not want to think of leaving. Then—those first days after it really happened—Anschluss and the Webbers and the others—then I know you felt I was ready to go. Even my note today—I don’t blame you for feeling I agreed, because I did. But now—”

  “Yes?” His voice was quiet, without disapproval.

  “But now I know I can’t. You will have your work, new patients, and you are, anyway, different, stronger—men are always stronger. But I—I will never feel at home, never feel happy, always want to be back here—”

  “No, Christl, it only seems hopeless now, because you are tired, because this packing up is hard—”

  “I can’t, Franz. I feel I—I cannot learn to live over again—I—oh, I’m afraid—”

  He sat beside her then, but did not make any other move.

  “People are always a little afraid, Christl,” he said. “But your fears will go. We’ll be together, always, and the children. What could harm us? Many people are going through this same sadness and fear—all over the earth, everywhere. Think of all the Germans who’ve already gone to Holland, Belgium, Denmark, England—”

  “That’s it, that’s just what I mean,” she broke in, passion and pleading in her voice. “Why can’t we simply go somewhere near—Holland or Belgium is as safe as America, and we would not be such foreigners there—the language—the habits—we could still see our friends, families—”

  “As safe as America? Many Germans came to Austria, thinking it would always be safe here. I suppose that Holland or Belgium is safe—yet sometimes I think of the Wolffs in Holland, the Markheimers in France—”

  “How wise they were. They’re at home—in Europe—Europeans are never happy anywhere else.”

  He was looking off into a distance in history. “I try to imagine how it would be to settle again, build a new life, and then—have to fly once more—to have it to do all over again—”

  “But really what I mean,” she cried out as if she were afraid to lose his attention to these new speculations of his, “I might as well say it. You will be angry, you will think I have no principles, but I must tell you—I have been feeling it more and more—”

  “I will not be angry. Of course, say it. Say it wholly, and without keeping back any part.”

  “—Say that I can’t—really—see any more why we should go at all. Do you hear, why we should go at all! It was an impulse—a fine, big impulse to protest, to stand on our principles. But, oh, Franz, maybe—”

  “Yes—maybe?”

  “I think perhaps the best thing is to stay here after all, and fight the Nazis here—not desert Austria now—”

  Dismay lanced through his heart. This argument he had heard, too, as often almost as he had heard Schneirmann’s “it can’t be as bad in Austria.” Once he himself had dared to hope. But now? The hard, incorruptible fact that the Nazis would soon enough make any effective fight a mere dream, would kill or imprison the fighters, would plunder them of all power, of money, possessions, press, radio, meeting places—could this hard reality be overlooked any longer by anyone?

  Yes, the fight would go on, of course, underground, latent, waiting for events which might let it come into the open. But those events? There would have to be, first, war—would it, after all, come to war? Or would the world outside the maniac orbit of Spain, Italy, the Reich see in time and act in time? Perhaps so—perhaps the Loyalists in Spain, perhaps the Ch
inese would soon have stanch allies, before it was too late. In the meantime, the underground fight—

  “What are you thinking, Franz?”

  It was too complex to explain. Better to remain on the level passages of practical affairs.

  “How would we live here, Christa? My own practice is already falling to pieces. There will be no analysis even permitted in a few months—they will call it a degenerate Jewish myth.”

  “Yes, but there will always be a need for doctors. You were a doctor before you began to specialize…”

  “No.”

  The first shaft of anger. She was tired, she was ridden by tensions and anxieties, true, but this suggestion was too monstrous. How could she brush aside his years of devoted work and study and practice in this still evolving branch of science?

  To suggest he go back now to taking temperatures and writing prescriptions—it was a betrayal, an enmity.

  Calmness came over him, then, all at once. Betrayal, nonsense, Enmity, nonsense. He, too, was too tired, too intense. She was not seriously suggesting anything of the sort. She was merely thrashing about in her weary, frightened mind, reaching violently for anything that came to hand which might serve as a weapon against the departure she still resisted more than he—or she—had suspected. Time, she needed time, to accept the necessity more completely. There was always a mourning period after any death. “To say good-by is to die a little.” It was an overemotional cliché, but there was truth in it.

  Silent minutes slid by. When he began to talk, it was not in direct reply to what she had said, but of Germany and Austria, of the deep, neurotic self-revelations in Mein Kampf, in Hitler’s obsessive, revenge-ridden concept of “the master race.” He talked almost dispassionately, wanting her to gain insight for herself from the things she knew so well but still refused to fit in the painful pattern they made. Often they had had such talks, but never before had he felt there was so much at stake, for her own future and for the children’s, as well as for his.