The Trespassers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  For a moment she held it high, then with one heaving, lurching effort of both her arms, she threw the monstrous thing across the room. She heard the smash, the tinkling of glass—the spinning was mixed up with it all and the falling, the sliding. And somewhere in the very pit of life the tearing, pushing pain.

  Honor. Integrity. Say the words in Spanish to the 300,000 starving Spanish refugees massed now at the French border, to the 200,000 behind them who will press forward into France when the horror is complete and Madrid surrendered to the Fascists. Say it to the disarmed Spanish soldiers under guard at Argelès and Saint-Cyprien in democratic France, say it to the women and children in the concentration camps at Perpignan, in the camps at Clairville, Auch, Port-Vendres, and Marseille. They are treated like enemy prisoners by France; they have no regular shelter, no sanitary equipment, little medical help, and starvation rations.

  Say it to them all—the newest half million to push wildly across the borders to a foreign land where no welcome waits. They are the Loyalists—they fought for freedom, they fought the Fascists for freedom.

  Once they were Spain’s teachers—2063 men and women now in concentration camps were teachers. And they were Spain’s builders and masons—17,000 men now in concentration camps were builders and masons. And 10,272 of Spain’s mechanics are there now, and 45,918 peasants who worked Spain’s soil, and 2440 of Spain’s printers who made the newspapers and the brave placards and posters to arouse Spaniards to fight the Fascists.

  And there are also Spain’s architects and engineers in the concentration camps of France, and her dentists, pharmacists, nurses, opticians. Her tailors and musicians are there, her bullfighters and surgeons and aviation mechanics are there, and her blacksmiths and millers and vintners…

  Say the words to them. Honor. Integrity. They will know what you mean. Their honor, their integrity. They will not think of the parliamentarians who prattled of embargoes and neutrality acts while the deadly supplies came in from Hitler and Mussolini; they will not think of the “nonintervention” principles of Chamberlain and Bonnet and the isolationist blocs in the American Congress. They will think instead of their own brothers and fathers and sons who gave their lives on the rich Spanish earth to show other men everywhere how much one must finally give for freedom.

  Speak to them in Spanish. In soft and liquid syllables try to explain the immigration laws which they soon may be meeting face to face, as so many others from other lands have already done before them.

  Not all of them, of course, but those at least who know that prison or the death sentence waits them if they try to go “home. To those, explain the laws of the earth’s countries, to the officers and the political leaders, the most active speakers and fighters of Loyalist Spain, who know that many years must pass and much blood spill on other rich earth before the battle is won and the homeward march begun.

  To France, staggering under the impact of this new half million, came quick help from mighty governments and their peoples and the committees of all civilized nations. Money was sent, and wheat and flour, medical supplies and clothing. Over a million dollars came forth in a few weeks from twenty-four countries on the old continents and the new.

  But the open door? The gate swung wide?

  Through all that spring, with all the efforts of individuals and committees, with a thousand wires pulled and a hundred thousand voices pleading “emergency,” the immigration laws grinned in the anxious face, laughed at the pleading tongue.

  Great Britain opened her mighty doors to 310 of this newest half million. North Africa received 500. The U.S.S.R. about 450. Chile was more lenient—1000 found safety in her long, narrow miles. And Mexico was most generous of all—2125 Spaniards in the first half of 1939 found haven in Mexico.

  The United States welcomed some of these brave fighters. The quota for Spain is 252 in any year. And in this year of grace, the United States of America permitted 250 of Spain’s men and women to set foot on her sympathetic soil.

  Money, yes, dollars, pounds, gulden, francs—yes. Wheat and drugs and bandages—yes. But the simple gesture of welcome, the quickly opened port of entry? Impossible, amigos, it is the law.

  The news from Spain, the Nazi march into Prague, the imperturbable mien of Zurich, and the silence from America, all fused a metallic core in Franz Vederle’s heart.

  His interlude of self-imposed calm had vanished. Once again his nerves jumped with tension. Once again he wanted only to go to Zurich and shout out strident anger at their inaction and silence.

  Europe was collapsing into the flaming crater of war. The occupying of Bohemia and Moravia last week screamed it to all the world; the imminent surrender of Madrid should echo and re-echo that dying scream of warning.

  In these last days of March, he felt, no man still caught in the tumult of migration could fail to live in a specialized fear that war must surely come before he once again had a foothold on a permanent shore.

  He tried every trick he knew to keep the children from guessing his desperate anxiety. But they sensed it as children always do. They talked again of Döbling, remembering small things that he had not heard them mention for months. Paul was moody, and when he spoke of his coming birthday, he said almost sullenly, “Boys of twelve have a kind of junior army in Italy and Germany, haven’t they?” Ilse was unexpectedly quarrelsome and fretful. One night, she made up a story about a little chicken lost in the woods, hungry and starving and unable to find her mother, and after that her childish tales and fantasies were often on the same theme. Their simple symbolism was clear even to Christa.

  And Christa herself had entered a new phase, which on the surface seemed natural enough, innocent enough, but which dismayed him more than he would admit to her.

  Christa liked Ascona, it was as simple as that. She said so with increasing frequency and pointedness. Casually at first, then more urgently, she conveyed her reluctance to leave. Spring was deepening the little town’s physical beauties, enriching the color of Lago Maggiore, the slopes above, with their fig trees, olives, pomegranates, and myrtle. All these enchanted her. And she had grown attached to the life they led, their friends, the walks for tea to the Hotel Monte Verita or the delightful Café Verbano—these gave her an inner contentment she had not known since they had left Austria a year before.

  He could not begrudge her this momentary peace of heart, nor would he, if he were not so certain of the potential of new misery that lay within it.

  One evening when rain-heavy clouds and winds swept in from the south, she looked at him and laughed.

  “Vento Mussolini,” she said. It was the regional joke for bad weather. “I feel so much better than I thought possible when we left Döbling, Franz. It is not so bad to be an émigrée, after all.”

  She never used the word “refugee.” Yet, though theirs had been technically a voluntary emigration, that was balanced by the fact that a voluntary return was impossible now—except to Dachau or Sachsenhausen or that death penalty so widely advertised by the Nazis for only part of the sins they had committed.

  “It is lucky that we came here from Zurich,” he said warily. “You might have had more of those chest colds if we had stayed north all winter.”

  “I don’t mean just physically better,” she said. “Here, it’s easy to imagine settling down…”

  She fell into a reverie, and when she spoke again, she told him once more how much she enjoyed the people they knew, the musical evenings, the sense of being respected and liked again. Gently, he tried to make her understand how she was screening herself from reality.

  And a few days later it would come up once more. It added to his fears about what still lay before them all.

  Of that future he could now think only with a resentful stubbornness of hope. In spite of the cable from New York—that thrilling cable which had released him at last from his long secretiveness with Christa, and in spite of the brief letter from the Consulate, saying the same thing and bearing the cautious phrase, “if your c
ases are approved”—in spite of this definite advance, they still seemed a millennium away from the actual visas.

  One more letter came from America, and then silence. The day after she had cabled, she had written and enclosed a copy of the whole Washington letter. He too was enraged at the calm reference to the Immigration Act of 1924—Zurich had omitted that detail. He had replied to her, he had written the Consulate once again, but so far there had been no answer from either place.

  But it was only her silence that was extraordinary. He knew the schedules of every mail boat, and a dozen had come from America since the time he had expected her answer. Only once before, had she ever delayed. She might be ill once more…

  The days crawled by. On the twenty-eighth, Madrid fell and the long war in Spain was done. His prodigious sorrow over its outcome was the newest whetstone on which his mind honed the steel of his private fears. He wrote once again to the Consulate, asking either for a personal interview or for further written word as to the status of their case now that his wife’s quota difficulty had at last been cleared.

  But days went and again there was no answer. He knew the demand for visas must have reached panic proportions at Zurich and everywhere else. But his own anger could not cool down.

  Then the letter came. “The Consulate General makes reference to your letter…” His eyes leaped ahead with greedy haste. “…proofs of the fortune which you pretend to possess.” (My God, “pretend,” still pretend?) “It is acknowledged that this fortune is a part of the fees of your American and British patients…If this is the case, this money should have been in your possession when you put in an application for a visa. The Consulate General would be obliged if you would offer an explanation why you did not mention it in your application on the place provided for it.

  “From the files of the Consulate General, it is evident that only on May 25, 1938, did you mention for the first time that you were in possession of some money. He is very anxious to know why you delayed giving full information of the means which you pretend to have possessed at the time, since this question is of great importance to you and your family.”

  He did not curse or shut or swear. He just stared at the letter in motionless disbelief.

  The drop of water to drive a man mad. The anonymous threat on a scrap of paper. The slow, steady poison of suspicion. Was there some devious purposefulness in this incredible succession of delays and demands? Or was it merely an inefficiency so stupendous that one could not believe in its simple existence?

  He rejected the first idea. Then it must merely be that a dozen clerks and Vice-Consuls, in turn, handled the correspondence that came in on visa cases, and that each one could know only a fraction of the history or the pertinent material on any given problem.

  And the native caution of the underling must come into it, too.

  Minor officials invariably avoided positive action and positive decisions. They knew they could get into difficulty only by deciding something, never by fobbing it off with a new question, sending another mimeographed from or another letter. Probably half of the delays, half the new demands in any visa case, came about, as simply as that.

  This newest demand was in itself a simple matter to clear up. He had only to explain all over again in writing what he had explained nine months ago in person—what should be self-evident to any government official who knew the laws of the Third Reich about “a citizen’s money” in foreign countries. One didn’t write details on application blanks that would be handled by a dozen secretaries and clerks. The Gestapo had their agents everywhere, even among the stenographers and file clerks of foreign embassies and consulates. The American consular officials presumably knew that. They were not babes in arms.

  But he would patiently go into it all once more.

  And there would then again be weeks of delay. He couldn’t even fool himself into expecting this one point to be cleared with decisive speed.

  Only Washington might force the speed. He thought then of cabling Vera Stamford. And instantly his deep unease about her rose again to the surface of his mind and emotions.

  Still no word from her. It was six weeks since her cable. Six weeks of silence.

  Only in emergencies could he now permit himself the cost of cabling. But all at once, the submerged concern for her pointed into a clamor to know the truth. She had become precious to them all.

  BOTH WORRIED ABOUT YOUR SILENCE. ARE YOU AGAIN ILL?

  He sent the cable and then wrote the Consulate. This time, he did not work his sentences into the decorous polish with which he usually wrote. In the very vigor of his explanation, his resentment showed through at being taken to task, as though he were a cheat or a scoundrel.

  “…and it was clearly never my intention to conceal from you nor any trustworthy person the existence of my Swiss fortune. I refer you to the specific mention of it in Mrs. Stamford’s original affidavit, dated April, 1938…”

  He reviewed the whole matter in minute detail. It should satisfy a two-year-old. But when he mailed it, unease still crawled about in the flesh of his mind. They would delay, waste precious time, find new loopholes—he knew now of cases where three years went by before visas were issued! Was theirs to be another such case?

  There was an American mail going off the next day. He wrote to Vee to ask if she once again could help. If she were not ill, he thought, if there were some happier explanation of her silence, then let the letter be on its way.

  Two days later a cable came from New York. It was signed “Benson.”

  MRS. STAMFORD RECUPERATING FROM HOSPITAL ILLNESS. AM WITHHOLDING ALL MAIL UNTIL RECOVERY.

  Christa read it with him. They were silent for some minutes. He saw in her face that she took this as personally as he himself did.

  “Our one real friend in this whole terrible business,” Christa said slowly.

  That night, after the children were in bed, the moment came. Franz knew its face instantly, as though he were long familiar with it.

  He heard sounds from Christa’s room, and went in to find her sobbing. She began to speak, and immediately her words were violent, as if they had been boiling up within her for months.

  “Let’s give it up, let’s forget it, don’t keep on in the face of what’s impossible,” she began. “Everything has gone wrong for us, from the first moment with these Americans. They don’t want us there, that is why they think up a new excuse every month to keep us here. Then let us be too proud to go there. Let us stay here where we are, until Austria is safe again.”

  He went to her, but she gestured him away.

  “No, no, don’t comfort me again, and tell me it will be done soon. I am not a child, to be petted back to smiling again. I hate this, I have hated this whole begging position we are in for months—a year it is now. I—”

  “I hate it, too.”

  “We are like beggars. You always have to explain one more thing, and prove one more thing. They treat us as if we were criminals. They don’t want us—they’re sick of foreigners in that whole country—they show us clearly they don’t want us. Have you no pride, to go on trying?”

  “Pride. Stop that. That word—”

  His voice brought her up sharp. It was strong, it was tough-fibered, it was not a voice that begs and cringes.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean it for you,” she said. “I—oh, Franz, you are strong, but I—”

  Sobs tore through her sentences. He knew pity for this torment before him. His eyes warmed and softened. But she did not see them. Her face was in her hands. That was the way she had talked to him that last night in Döbling, when the packing was done and they sat together in their living room for the last time.

  “Why, why can’t we stay here? I can talk in my own language to my own countrymen here. I can’t begin all over again, and go to some new place.”

  He waited until she had given him all the reasons. He knew every one she would adduce, every argument she would offer. But he waited until she had poured them out for him.


  “Darling, Christl, to settle for ten or twenty years in a small vacation town? That is only a form of suicide, a kind of death to development and growth for the children, for you, for my work. You have seen what happens—”

  “Don’t—you always know how to persuade me. But I don’t want to listen.” She shook her head again and again; her voice was throaty and out of control. “I am different, I tell you, I can’t go to that country where they don’t want us. You go—let me stay here in Europe where I belong. I’ll stay—”

  He would have laughed at the fantastic notion, but her despair was too real.

  “You’d better leave me behind, you’d better…”

  He took her into his arms, and said nothing. He held her, until the explosion spent itself, until the tumbling debris of her words quieted down.

  “You forget one thing, Christl,” he said softly at length. “You forget that we love each other, you forget that I love you too much to leave you, ever, for anything. Maybe you really forget some times?”

  She clung to his body for answer.

  “If you really mean this—if you tell me tomorrow seriously and calmly that you mean this, that you want me to notify the Consulate we have changed our minds and withdraw our applications—”

  “Don’t—don’t torture me with such problems now. I think I mean it. But by tomorrow I will know it is bad for you and the children—”

  “Maybe it’s the bad news today in the cable that depressed you so,” he said slowly. “Sometimes one more small disaster shatters one’s whole courage. But she is recuperating, it says so.”

  “No, I felt very badly; she is like one of us now, but the cable couldn’t have anything to do with the way I feel about going there.”

  Above her bowed head, he smiled. It couldn’t have anything to do, she thought. But an apparently irrelevant thing had everything to do with these climactic moments in living.

  “Franz, believe it, I mean it, whenever I think how it will be there, I feel sure I can’t, I feel in my bones. I can’t.”