There had been no further plea that they stay on in Switzerland. But some part of her spirit had gone into hiding. She was spinning a cocoon for herself to dwell in. And its name was Ascona.
The train was slowing to its stop.
“There she is, Franz. At the end; that must be she.”
Christa started up the platform, and in two long strides, he was abreast of her. He was pleased to hear the excited note in her voice; with some amusement he noted that his pulse had quickened. Far ahead on the platform he saw a slim, small figure.
“Oh, she’s beautiful, Franz. She looks quite beautiful. She looks so young, too.”
Yes, it was she. She had stopped, and was looking about her. He saw her eyes turn toward them. She smiled.
Vee saw the tall, striding man, the blonde woman, coming toward her. She broke into a little run and came toward them. How nice they are, she thought, how—
“You are Vera Stamford,” Franz said. His voice was husky.
“And you’re Dr. Vederle—and you’re Mrs. Vederle.” Her own voice was strange in her ears, as she put out her hands to both of them at once.
“This is—es ist wunderbar,” Christa said, and the excitement of this meeting was in her voice, too.
“For the last hour I thought, ‘What if we don’t recognize each other on the platform?’ ” Vee said, laughing. “I should have sent you a picture of me.”
“We would have known you,” he said, and his voice still struck at her with the warm, deep notes in it. She looked up at him, saw the dark, alive eyes, the candid face welcoming, her, liking her. She looked at Christa, at her delicate coloring, the shy smile, and she was stirred at the ready affection they each let her see.
They collected her bags then, and took her off in the small car they had hired for her visit. An awkwardness fell upon them for the first moments of the drive, but that did not dismay her. She had thought that it must be so, until they had had a little time.
“Paul and Ilse were furious that we would not let them come, too,” Dr. Vederle said. “They are so excited as puppies.”
“Yes, they have—that whole day, they ask, the train to go to,” Christa said.
Vee did not catch all of what she said, for the accent was heavy and difficult. “They’re handsome children,” she said. “That snapshot you sent of them was my only idea of what any of you looked like.”
All through the drive, dots of silence followed each spurt of talk, but it was a silence filled with their immediate response to each other. Vee was enchanted by the flowery countryside; she was going to be at ease and happy here with these two people. Talking with Mrs. Vederle would be hard at first; the barrier of language would stand between them. But Dr. Vederle—in spite of the almost perfect letters he wrote, she had never dreamed he would speak English this way. There was a faint accent, yes; the letter s buzzed a bit with the z sound and he stretched out some vowels. But otherwise—
“I wrote you that I know only a little German,” she said impulsively. “I’m so glad I don’t have to try.”
“I—but not I—I do not speak so well English as Franz and the children,” Christa said.
“You will, when you get to America, you’ll see,” Vee said. As she had done with Bronya, at the beginning, she put a little space of time around each word.
“When we get to America,” Dr. Vederle said. “This family knows those words better than the Ten Commandments.” He chuckled a little, but Vee did not laugh.
The house was charming, a flat-roofed cottage of rough cement, set on a rounded knoll at the edge of the lake. An outside staircase of rough stone bricks climbed up one side; the garden about it bloomed with roses and neat flower beds.
“I work in garden—all that time,” Christa said. “Like to home.”
The children stood side by side, primly waiting for their descent from the car. Paul was bigger than she had expected; he would be tall and distinguished and handsome, one day, she thought, like his father. Ilse looked like Christa; she was a picture child in the starched pinafore dress she wore.
Even the children’s voices held the special note that said this was a great occasion. Only after the first polite greetings were over did they subside into more ordinary tones.
“I know all about you,” Paul said shyly. “My father and mother always talk how you work visas in America.”
Dr. Vederle laughed aloud.
“Mrs. Stamford does other things besides get visas for us, Paul.”
“You’re just as our family,” Ilse said, nodding. “That’s what I know.”
“You see what we say here about you,” Dr. Vederle said, and Vee knew he was pleased at the inadvertent testimony.
The faint constraint wore away with the afternoon. By evening, the children treated her like any grownup, pleasant enough but inevitably of another category. Paul asked a dozen questions about the Normandie, and about the exact height of the buildings in New York. Ilse managed to seat herself next her always, tucking her small body close, on the porch settee or inside on the sofa, in a wordless friendship. The physical closeness caught Vee’s mind back to the buried thoughts about wanting a child. But she banished the thoughts in stern refusal.
Later, when the children were asleep, the three of them sat together talking until it was quite late. There was still the formality of the “Mrs. Stamford,” and from Vee the absence of any direct address by name. But apart from that, there went from one to the other of them the quick, sure intimacy of people who had lived through something arduous together until they had won. They retraced the successive steps they had each taken, and as Franz pointed to particular moments that were the high spots of his anger or despair, Vee repaid his confidences with a similar recital of her own feelings as this or that cable or letter came.
Christa said little. From time to time, Franz would turn to her and speak in German, and she would nod rapidly and gratefully for being saved from the difficulty of trying to follow everything. But she seemed pleased and interested throughout the evening; Franz noticed how she watched every gesture Vee made, how she studied the lovely, vivid face with its deep-socketed gray eyes, its fine modeling. Christa had said, “She’s beautiful, she’s quite beautiful.” Franz knew what she meant; this was not an orthodox prettiness, no, but there was an immediate striking appeal that had made Christa say it. He remembered the day a year ago when he had amused himself by trying to visualize her from the cool, official data in her affidavit, and he smiled.
“Have you a Steinway piano?” he suddenly said. His eyes gleamed with a kind of mischief.
“Yes, but that’s a funny question. Why?”
“Once I tried to imagine about you, and how you looked, short or tall, thin or fat, and also what you liked; I thought you might have a Bechstein, but then I changed the brand to a Steinway. Do you like music?”
“I love it,” she said. She was pleased that he should have tried to visualize her. She looked toward the piano.
“Franz plays it so—so wonderful,” Christa said. “You will admire.” She looked questioningly at Franz, but he shook his head.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “It is more interesting to talk now.”
The talk went, inevitably, to the news, to Hitler’s livid attacks on the British “encirclement” policy, to his recent renouncing of the naval accord treaty with Britain and the 1934 Nazi pact with Poland. They talked of the Italians in Albania, and of the increasing stridency of Hitler’s demands for the return of Danzig and a road through the Corridor to East Prussia. And they talked of war. Not whether or not there would be a war, as Vee reported so many people in Paris, and before that in New York, were still talking. But only of when it would start. In the fall? Sooner than that?
It brought them even closer. Vee knew the special fear these two must have, to be stranded without a country, without citizenship if war came before…
“It is not so easy,” Franz said slowly, and with a trace of the huskiness she had heard on the station platform,
“to know how to say ‘thank you’ to you.”
“Oh, don’t say—please, it would make me feel—” She looked at each of them in turn and they all fell silent.
Suddenly she wished she could tell them what unsuspected role they had played for her—but one could never speak out about such things. Someday perhaps, back home, long after they had settled there, then if they were friends and close enough, then she might try to make them see it the other way round.
“But just the same,” he said, as if he were finishing a sentence, “if we do get to America in time, it will”—his dark eyes sought hers—“it will be you who has saved us.”
She made no answer. She could not.
In bed that night, under the bright moonlit squares of the windows, Vee lay waiting for sleep. She had stopped hearing their voices from the room across the small hall. The night was still, the air fragrant with a strange, tropical sweetness. And though she could not sleep, though her mind still carried her sometimes across the ocean, back to New York, back to Jasper, she lay for the most part in peace. “The world is round,” she thought quizzically. “You come to a frightful precipice and you think it’s the end of everything. But then you find that the world goes on from there. There aren’t any edges.”
This meeting with the Vederles had balm and solace in it. It held reaffirmation and hope for her. For fourteen years, their love had lasted; it was obvious they loved each other still. Through good years and bad, it had endured; it was steadfast, it was reliable. Here was this man, brilliant and renowned, yet apparently free of that excess of self-emphasis that was a prime characteristic of all the success worshipers. He had strength, but it was for others o use as well as for himself. He had force and it was for something bigger than ambition. She had sensed it in his letters. Now she knew.
There were other such men in the world. One day she might find—She broke off the thought abruptly. Patience, she counseled herself; it takes time. You don’t fall in love every minute, you don’t find happiness at every turn. But this meeting with them today was a strong stimulant to hoping. Someday she would meet a man who had the kind of clear quality that was so apparent when it was really there. It comforted her, strangely, even to be able to hope happiness again.
She fell asleep soon, her hand curled under her cheek. When she awoke, it was to a mixture of sunlight, the good smell of coffee, subdued voices drifting up from downstairs. She dressed quickly and ran down, eager to be with them again.
She stayed a week. It was a queer, variable week of shifting mood and color. Some of its hours had an easy, sunny simplicity, when they took walks or drives through the luxuriant countryside, when they sat listening to Franz playing Brahms ballades and Bach preludes and fugues, playing Beethoven and Schumann and Mozart. And then would come hours when she guessed that Christa and Franz as well were caught in an aching tension about their future; that they were both tormented by their exasperating inability to plan with certainty, to measure the time that would elapse before they could find themselves a permanent status once more. Never before had she realized so intimately that “the stateless” live always with the sensation of being lost and adrift; never before had she known how safe, how precious, it was merely to know you were a citizen of a nation.
And she realized other things, as the mornings and afternoons and evenings unrolled, and the veil of first strangeness was lifted between them all. She knew that Christa was afraid, that under her quiet smile and speech lay fear. It was only through small clues that she detected the truth about Christa, but she was sure it was truth.
“Are all those American girls,” Christa asked suddenly one morning, “so—chic and—and so—their life controlling—like you, Vee?”
“Oh, my clothes,” Vee answered with a shrug. “I’m in the fashion business, so I have to pay attention to them.”
“But you about everything are so—so with ease. You travel by yourself—you—always American women are so—so—”
For a moment Vee was silent. Then she put her hand on Christa’s arm.
“Don’t be nervous about America,” she said gently. “It’s a wonderful country, you will see.”
Christa nodded slowly. “But I think—it must be now—they hate every foreigner there. Like all the countries.”
Vee’s heart contracted as she saw the look in the blue eyes. This year had humiliated Christa, frightened something in her.
Things as small as that were clues enough. Franz had fears too, but his were the fears anyone would have who had seen the hundred obstacles that could lie unsuspected between the application for visas and the moment one finally received them.
“July. The new American quota begins on the first of July,” he said in a reflective, dubious way one evening. “But maybe the Consulate will then present us with some new delays for several months; how can one know anything about it?”
“But they said officially the visas would be granted,” Vee said.
“Yes, I know.” He smiled ruefully. “Just the same, when I withdraw now some moneys for living expenses, and the bank balance grows always less, I pray they don’t suddenly raise some new question about my resources. For now some Vice-Consul would look at my bankbook and make surely the great discovery that I have no forty thousand francs but only thirty-two thousand. Ergo, I am a fraud, a cheat, a falsifier of documents.”
Vee did not smile in return. He was exaggerating, yes; but there was enough sickening possibility in his words…
“He’s afraid something will still happen to keep them in Europe,” she thought. “But Christa is just afraid. That’s different.”
“It will be over soon, Franz,” she said aloud. “The whole visa thing is—it’s not the way America is.”
“You wrote me once, ‘We’re not all like that,’ ” he said. He tilted his head a little to one side, and studied the cigarette he held in his hand. Then his eyes raised to hers. “That letter I remembered many, many times this year.”
The days and evenings passed, and Vee saw into their hearts and understood how it must be. Even their two children, safe with their parents as so many of Europe’s children no longer were, even these two tanned, healthy children were not really untouched by the year they had been through.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Paul?” she asked him idly once, while he rowed her along the shore in the old boat that went with the house.
He looked quite solemn for a moment.
“I shall like to be that man in the Consulate,” he replied, “that gives out the visas.”
It caught her heart. A child’s sense of ultimate glory, of the full magnificence of strength and power. It wasn’t funny. Oh, it was anything but funny.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THEY MISSED HER WHEN she had left them. Franz and Christa said so to each other a dozen times in the first days after she was gone. In some odd way she had made America seem closer, more definite. It was more than her American speech, her easy American friendliness, her American point of view. That had done part of it. But she had clearly liked them, she had taken them to her heart—and somehow, while she was there, she seemed a living symbol of her country. America would take them to its heart, too.
But when she was gone, a blankness settled down in her place. She was within reach, yes—she had promised to keep them always informed of her changing addresses so they could reach her easily and quickly if the need arose. They could even telephone her now. In England or on the Continent she would be near.
But they missed her. Now there was again only the waiting for the days and nights to pass until the new quota year should begin. The news on the radio, the news in the papers, the contents of letters which they received or which their fellow exiles in Ascona received and reported—all piled up day by day a dozen new, a hundred new, bits of evidence of the precarious race they were running with time and with the tightening resistance of the world toward the stranger.
One day Christa held out to Franz Das Neue Tagebuch, th
e anti-Nazi paper published in Paris. The hand offering it trembled and the pointing finger zigzagged over the item she wanted him to read.
It was a report about a refugee ship, the Hamburg-American St. Louis. Nine hundred and seven refugees, fortunate ones with proper landing permits and papers, had embarked on her for Cuba. Most of them hoped to wait there until their American visas were issued to them. But after they had put to sea from Europe, Cuba issued a new decree. Any refugee for Cuba must receive a special permit from her Department of Labor, her Department of State, and her Treasury before leaving a foreign port.
On May 29, the S.S. St. Louis had arrived there with its nine hundred travelers. They had never heard of the new decree. They were not permitted to land. All pleas to Cuba failed. Individuals wrote and cabled; the Joint Distribution Committee offered to post $450,000 in guarantee bonds that they would not become public charges. But Cuba remained firm. Cuba already houses three thousand refugees from Germany and that is enough. The S.S. St. Louis finally nosed about and was now once more on the Atlantic, headed back for Europe, headed back for the concentration camps and firing squads of Germany. Her nine hundred passengers were still upon her, except for those who committed suicide rather than return.
Franz read the story. His hands did not tremble. He remembered the S.S. Cap Norte, bearing a small group of refugees for Paraguay, and the S.S. Monte Olivia, bound there also with another small group. The refugees on both ships had their visas for Paraguay. But to get to inland Paraguay one must pass through Uruguay. They had no visas for Uruguay, so they were not permitted upon her soil. The two ships had been sailing the wide seas off South America since the last week in April.
And he remembered other tales he had read but never told Christa. The refugee camp on the German-Polish border, with five thousand starving people thrown out of Germany and then refused entry to Poland; the two thousand refugees bound for Palestine during the winter just passed, and ice-blocked for weeks on the Danube in Rumania; the stranded boatloads of three thousand refugees in the Greek islands and in Syria…
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