“That was Vienna calling back. The head official was still absent. But the clerk reported there was no dossier. That means one hundred per cent.”
Franz’ mind flashed congratulations to him that he had left Döbling before the new spying registrations of each individual had reached him, listing his friends, his colleagues.
“That is good,” he said dryly. “You understand I do not wish to press you needlessly. I may remain stuck in Ascona for some time—on the other hand, I may be leaving at once. I never know what will develop overnight.”
“Oh, you will have your own passport right now, before you leave here today,” the Vice-Consul put in eagerly. “The other, for your wife and children, you will please mail us with their signatures, and you will have them back by return post. You see, while the call was going through, I had the passport pictures affixed and the data copied out of the old ones.”
“That is what I call ‘expediting,’ ” Franz complimented him.
Only after the Consul General had withdrawn did the eyes behind the lenses seek Franz’ directly. There was a wistfulness in the voice as he asked his question.
“Could you, Herr Doktor, I mean—is there any way one can be helped to get into the foreign service of the Gestapo? It must be so—so exciting to be sent to this country or that.”
Franz made a mask of his face.
“I know nothing to tell you,” he said. “I am sorry.”
“Yes, Herr Doktor, I understand. Of course.”
The children and Christa were at the station to meet him. Even before the train stopped, he nodded to her to tell her he had succeeded. For once he had succeeded, completely and with dispatch.
In return, she waved an envelope at him. It could only be a radiogram. Christa looked pleased. Paul and Ilse were as eager for him to get off as if he had been away a year instead of one night. Their bouncing, shrieking greetings were absurd in their disregard for the facts. And they delighted his heart.
“I have them with me,” he said to Christa.
“Have what, Daddy? Have what? Oh, tell me,” Ilse shouted.
“It’s secrets, about Christmas,” Paul said. “Shut up, anyway, you make too much racket.”
“I do not. You think just because—”
Franz had taken the radiogram from Christa: ASKED INTERVENTION AND HELP FROM WASHINGTON … HAPPIER YEAR IN THE U.S.A. IN 1939. Inexplicably, he felt as if he would cry. The very words made it seem a nearer possibility. She knew, she deeply, truly understood.
Slowly he folded the cable and put it into his pocket. Christa had taken his arm.
“I felt that way, too,” she said. “She sent it, instead of writing, to make the holidays better for us.”
“That is a sweet woman,” he said gravely.
When they were alone at home, he put gingerly fingers into his inside pocket. He drew out the passports, and handed them to her as if the very touch were offensive.
“Deutsches Reich. Reisepass,” she read aloud from the cover. “I never could have imagined that we—”
She turned to the pages inside, a green color with pinkish-brown spots. Except for the first four, the rest were blank. She kept turning over the empty pages. The last one was numbered 32.
“How ugly they make everything,” she said. “And how many blank pages for visas.” She began to read the descriptive matter opposite Franz’ picture. “Nervenarzt. Those fools in Lugano probably take it as nerve doctor, not anything so degenerate as ‘psychoanalyst.’”
“Not only in Lugano,” he chuckled. “In Vienna, at the Gestapo. I counted on that.”
He told her the story, relishing the memory of every bit of it. She was dazzled at his temerity, a little frightened, too. How could he still have the sureness within him to do such things, now, after all the terrible months? She had never known until this year what a boon it must be to have unbreakable determination and courage. She admired him for these qualities, yet the very admiration made her more ashamed of her own inability to have them too. Even now, listening to his recital, she could only feel how different they were, for all that they lived together, shared everything.
No human beings were ever the same. Each had his or her own weakness or strength. It was when life forced you enough so that you could feel the discrepancy that you felt separated and alone.
Her face showed nothing of her thoughts. At the end of his story, she praised him, denied that it was “third-rate cinema stuff.” But she felt far outside his strong, clear laughter when he said, “Well, second-rate then; I won’t allow it to be better than that for any Nazis.”
That night, a group of their Ascona friends came in, and Franz played the piano. There were more than a dozen of them; some had come years before from Germany and were on their way to becoming Swiss citizens. Others were, like themselves, Austrians or Germans, waiting for visas. Some had waited longer than they. Tonight at least there were Gemütlichkeit and forgetfulness; she and Franz were almost like social leaders of this group. It was pleasant to feel looked up to.
Ilse was asleep, but for these weekly gatherings, Paul was permitted to stay up until after ten. Franz played so beautifully, so warmly; all the faces in the room were relaxed and pleased. It was almost like being at home, this life in Ascona. She was used to it now, and the other émigrées gave her a sense of solidarity and safety. She could imagine settling in Ascona…
She caught herself up. That was a new nonsense, and she must not drift with it. It was folly to imagine anything. She knew only what each day told her. That and the fact that Franz had warned her that many weeks would go by before the letters from his patients could arrive. Late February or March. He had guessed March. That would be almost a year from the time they had set forth.
The weeks of the new year began their slow unfolding. The day-by-day impatience of last summer and early fall no longer was a constant erosive to Franz’ nerves and spirit. He knew now how it must be, and he constantly schooled himself to endure it calmly.
One by one the letters from the old patients began to arrive. The first ones were postmarked “London” or “New York,” from people who had not moved from their old addresses. Soon they would come in from further points, perhaps with explanations about the delay of having had his request forwarded from place to place. Each letter was touching in its own personal way, with its attempt to express sympathy, yet never pity, that he should now find himself uprooted from his home and his work. Two contained checks for unpaid bills, though he had said nothing about money due him.
How important letters had become! He was like the soldier off in camp who, through letters, nourishes and keeps alive his dimming identity as brother, son, husband, lover. His own letters from his patients, from his colleagues, from the Psychoanalytical Society in London or Paris—they kept reminding him that he was not only an immigrant, but also a doctor, a scientist.
But letters from Vera Stamford were a thing apart. Since that day after Munich when he had resumed writing to her, her frequent letters had become the most gratefully received, the most eagerly read of all.
The copy of the letter she had written Washington was a sharp stimulant each time he read it. Her anger and impatience in behalf of people she had never met—they evoked in him an odd love for her, as if she were the God Fairy of his childhood stories.
And the impact of the letter itself was stimulating anew, no matter how many times he read it. In this Europe, it came almost as a shock to remember that a citizen could still write so wrathfully to government officials. That was magnificent. It was a banner still flying.
They would not ignore a letter like that in the State Department at Washington. They had already acted—only a few days after mailing the copy, she had written again, to tell him they were calling upon Zurich for a complete report. And now in another few days, there must come another letter from her. He even knew how it would start: “Today I heard from Washington…” He was so certain of her by now. She would not lose an hour. She, too, would fee
l that this letter from Washington might mark the final piece of road they still had before them.
The letter did not come until the last week of January.
“A week has gone since I heard from Washington,” it began, “and I hope you will forgive my delay. I was ill, under doctor’s care—do not worry, for I am all right again. But I had to neglect everything for a while.”
He paused a moment. An unexpected concern for her caught at him. She must have been seriously ill.
The whole letter was oddly different from all the others she had written them. It was brief, almost businesslike, as though she were a repressed, in drawing person. But she was not. Always, almost from the very beginning, she had been so warm, so affectionate, making them feel that they were indeed close friends, drawn together by a common aim, and that defeat in it would be as unthinkable for her as for them.
The short letter made three points: Zurich’s report said they still waited for him to demonstrate how and when he had earned his money; they were now satisfied with her specific pledge of fifty dollars a week, but not about “the motives that impelled her to undertake the support of the Vederle family in the United States,” and invited her to make a “supplementary statement” about that, and about her “plans for them.” The matter of the quota for Mrs. Vederle was being looked into.
She had, unfortunately, also lost a week in writing that “motive letter.” But she had now done so, and had just mailed it direct to Zurich. “Please do not hesitate to call on me again; I’m quite all right now.”
“No, you are not,” he answered her in his mind. “There is something wrong—you are not the Vera Stamford I know.”
But the news in the brief letter was, surely, another step forward. Her motive letter was in the hands of the Consulate this very moment. The very fact of “intervention” and interest in their case by the State Department in America must have some catalytic effect on that pompous officialdom there.
He should feel cheerful, and, indeed, in regard to their own status he did. But there was something in her phrasing, in the brevity of the letter—
“I’m falling in love with my Fairy Godmother,” he thought wryly. “That’s a quite new twist to the Oedipus complex.”
On a wind-swept hill in eastern Massachusetts, a young man stomped his way through the snowdrifts until he came to the Main Street of the town. There he went up to the mailbox, pulled down the small lever, and dropped a letter into the slot…
At a big pine table that served as her desk, a middle-aged woman tore open the letter which had just come from her Chicago house. She took out several dozen bank vouchers and slid them into the envelope that had been waiting for two weeks to receive them. Then she mounted the gray cow pony tethered to the fence outside the ranch house, and rode for town, five miles away. In the post office, she handed the heavy envelope to the postmistress and said, “Hi, Lenny, mark it for the fastest boat, would you?”…
At the Hotel Nacionale, in Havana, a white-haired, curtly man rang for the bellboy. In precise printed characters, he marked an envelope AIR MAIL TO NEW YORK, THEN S.S. AQUITANIA, and told the bellboy to be sure to get the proper number of stamps put on at the desk. …
From Florida, from Cairo, from California, the last letters were on their way to the small, sunny town of Ascona. And each one carried within it, expressed or unexpressed, the hope that it might indeed help the man who once had been the last hope of the writer.
Over all the seas, in all the mail trains and airplanes, through the post offices of far-flung cities and villages, countless other letters of help were now embarking on their own voyages of rescue and decency.
For though there were the granite laws, there were also the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, of men and women who were moving against every obstacle to help the hunted and the hated. To the waiting hands of the supplicants, the letters went, carrying the notarized document, the signed pledge to support, the money order or check or steamship ticket that might bring aid in time.
Time. Now it was, even more than before, a question of time, the hours one had before it would be forever too late. For each day that passed, each week, each fortnight, brought a giant multiplication in the numbers who tried to escape.
The gray debacle of Munich in September, the new laws against foreign Jews in Italy, the occupation of Teschen by the Poles in October, the fiery and bleeding pogroms throughout the Reich in November, the fingers of new Nazi conquest already stretching hungrily toward Moravia and Bohemia in December, the fall of fierce and stubborn Barcelona in January…
The hastening calendar of disaster sped into new tempo the efforts of the angry or compassionate in the world outside.
Individuals sent more affidavits and more letters, refugee committees and charities increased their staffs, besought emergency funds, combined their strategy wherever possible to save some part of the millions struggling against the fast-widening plague.
The committees—everywhere the committees worked more frantically than ever before. In every country, new ones were formed and older ones expanded to fight for lives that must otherwise be lost. The very names of the committees spoke out in the new international dialogue between those who cried out and those who tried to answer:
The National Co-ordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants from Germany; the Joint Distribution Committee; the Catholic Episcopal Committee for German Refugees; L’office pour les Allemands; Comité d’Assistance aux Réfugiés; the International Migration Service; the International Student Service; the Jewish Committee of Assistance in Italy; the American Committee for German Christian Refugees; the University in Exile…
There were the special committees for the children: The World Movement for the Care of Children from Germany; the Comité d’Aecueil aux Enfants d’Espagne; the Save-the-Children International Union; the Children’s Committee of Holland; the Czech Children’s Care Committee; the International Committee for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain…
And the Quakers; the Red Cross; the Commission for Polish Relief; the Catholic Committee for Refugees; the International Rescue and Relief Commission; the Hebrew Sheltering and Aid Society; the National Catholic Welfare Conference; the Dutch Refugee Committee; the English Refugee Committee…
These and dozens more, hundreds more, grappled now with the new pursuits of humane men: to find posts for displaced scholars, to assist displaced physicians, rescue the anti-Fascists of Spain and Italy, to rescue the Social Democrats, Marxists, anti-Nazis of every kind from Germany and Austria and Czechoslovakia, to save scholars and craftsmen and musicians and journalists, to rescue Jews and Protestants and Catholics, to save the children.
The committees. Everywhere the committees. Everywhere, they fought against the snail-like andante of “the case system” of emigration. In this time of the desperate need, the frantic hurry, that old relic from the era of leisurely and voluntary immigration still had to be venerated by practice. Each individual or family of those vast spilling hordes was a case, a file, a dossier; each must be treated singly, one by one.
An eyedropper to empty the ocean. An atomizer to spray out the forest fire. And with each succeeding week in the young calendar of 1939, the ocean roared the higher, the fire blazed the redder.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SUDDENLY IT BURST UPON Vee’s mind—the parallelism, the neat, the awful parallelism of her own pain to the pain of those millions.
She was beginning to think again, or she wouldn’t have seen it.
Those first days and nights after Jas had gone, she had not been able to think. Not what one calls “thinking.”
There was only the whirling of her thoughts, the spinning realization, the going over and over every step of the way by which she had come to this cataclysm.
The first nights alone, then the next days and nights when Ann had scarcely left her, that middle-of-the-night when old Dr. Burton had come at Ann’s frightened summons to inject morphia and make her sleep—all through
that time her mind had never quieted, but what it did was not the orderly process of thinking.
The sight of Dr. Burton’s kind old face flung up something in her memory, buried there ever since that day last May when she had asked him about the article she’d read about childless couples. She remembered his comfortable old voice saying, “Well, maybe they don’t want children as much as they say they do.” She winced from it, and when Ann said, “I think you’d better tell him all about it, Vee dear,” she only could say, “You do, Ann, you tell him, you tell him.”
She knew she could not produce an orderly report on it, that she would only be swept on in the unruled tide of her rushing memory, as she had been ever since that final bursting moment. “Go ahead alone, then.”
Even when she forced herself, a few days later, to go back to the store, thinking was impossible, in any real sense. She could carry out routine work, she could anchor her mind to a solid problem of merchandise, personnel, sales, but when the anchor was lifted again, the helpless tossing began once more. She began to stay at the store an extra hour every day. She multiplied her own assignments. She tried to keep anchored every moment.
A thousand times a day, there was a sight, a sound, a word to slash to her heart.
Mr. Ralsey in meeting, saying, “Let’s finish this up over some drinks—how about the Oak Room at the Plaza?”
A voice in a crowded elevator, “The Crown man in London, Geoffrey Kane…”
A taxi driver, taking a casual turn into the side street where Dr. Gontlen’s office was…
The Sherry-Netherland, the red roses in a florist’s window, a radio calling out, “This is WJCN,” a pregnant woman on the street, in the store, anywhere…
A thousand times a day, a voice, a word, a number, a name slashed at her. The printed letter J, the red numeral 1 the January calendar, a colored poster of Montego Bay—each of them now had a cabalistic power to strike hot pain into the core of her being.
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