The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  “I’m bitter, still. I don’t know if I can forgive him for hurting her. There,” she said, forcing a smile, “that’s my tale of love and family. Mixed record, I’d say.”

  He absorbed this, marking the glow of her. “A black sheep, I am—and I’m the only sheep. My father died when I was just a boy. By the time my father was my age, he’d published two books and was lecturing all over Germany and Poland and Russia. At nineteen I had no ideas beyond playing horn and kayaking. My stepfather found me a plum job at the Enskilda Bank and pulled strings to get me a place at Cambridge. But I hated working at the bank and didn’t much like Cambridge. I did a mediocre degree despite having a genius named Turing for a tutor. I couldn’t make the U.K. Olympic eight, so I went to the Berlin Olympics for Latvia and broke my wrist in my very first heat. Samuel found me another plum job with Beurling and that brought me to New York, where I hung around the NCR offices and helped your brother lose. My response? Take a duck dive in Havana and then darken your doorstep. I’ve got to get serious.”

  “I know Allen thought well of you, NCR did too, and you could get a job with any investment bank with your CV. Where’s the failure in that?”

  Misha made a sour face and shook his head. He sat up and set his pillow at his back. “I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like had my father lived and if I’d had a brother or sister.”

  Eleanor reached for her sweater and pulled it on, shrugging her head through the neck hole. “I’ll tell you a story about my brothers I’ve never told anyone.” She stopped again, recalling. “My father was dying. It was the fall of 1930. God, is it eleven years ago? It must be. My father had gathered all of us around him in his room. He made us all promise, with him lying there on his deathbed, that we’d all treat Foster as the head of the family when he was gone. And we all promised. Funny thing is,” Eleanor said softly, “Allie never showed—can you imagine? He was in Europe, Bern, I think. He never even came to the funeral, to his own father’s funeral. Still makes me so angry I can hardly speak. So I love him—at his best, there’s lots to love. But not without remembering the broken promises.”

  In the silence, as the candles flickered, Misha comprehended there were deep waters in Eleanor’s world, pressures and crosscurrents he’d seen among his politically connected friends at Cambridge. It’s what came, his stepfather had once memorably said of his own world, of vaults and boardrooms and toying with tigers.

  At half past two he sat upright and felt her move close.

  “What is it?” she asked from the darkness.

  “Does the U.S. still have an embassy in Warsaw?”

  “The ambassador’s in London, with the government-in-exile. There’d be someone on duty, a consul at least. Technically, the U.S. is still neutral, yes. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “This is an imposition. I need … could you help me with papers? Your contacts at State?”

  “Of course. I mean, I’ll try. There are procedures, rules, you know. I don’t run the place, I mean not yet,” she said, smiling up at him. Then she read his face: “Misha, what is it? You look awful.”

  “My mother has been stranded in Warsaw since the Poles surrendered. She had papers, good ones, and she was safe until three weeks ago. The Gestapo sent her to the ghetto,” Misha said, his voice flat. “I have to get her out. I need visas, passports, everything. I can pay.”

  “Dear God, your mother. Why haven’t you said something before?”

  “I didn’t want you to think that’s why I was here. That that’s why—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Eleanor replied, reaching for her glasses. “We’re well past that. I know you more than a little—and you’re in my bed because I want you here. Now, you’re going yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I have to try, it’s hell on earth there. She’s dead if I don’t move fast.”

  Eleanor pulled the counterpane around her and made for the ancient wall box telephone in the hallway. “I have an old family friend at the State Department, Max Puddicombe,” she said, spinning the bell crank. “Max knows the dragon lady who runs the visa section. Get a pen, write down the dates and places and times, and we’ll try Max.”

  “It’s a little early.”

  “The State Department never sleeps. He’ll answer.” She snapped a glance over at Misha. “What are you waiting for? There’s a pen and paper on the kitchen table. And make some coffee. We’re going to be up for a while.”

  XXXII

  EUROPE

  NOVEMBER 1941

  The Clipper flight to Lisbon was full: several film stars, a bevy of slick Spanish businessmen and their mistresses, not to mention at least one internationally notorious Vichy French collaborator, an Egyptian sheikh who smoked a hubble-bubble relentlessly, three Chinese women in superb silks, all three of great age and greater wealth … and not a single Jew Misha could spot.

  Misha never left his tiny stateroom, preferring to coil himself up, between steep bouts of sleep and hours whiled away at the stack of novels he’d bought at the Foynes bookshop on the Shannon layover. After Lisbon lay the train from Berlin east to Warsaw. He was going, quite deliberately, with malice aforethought, into the belly of the beast.

  And, six days and £2,200 of Samuel’s cabled money later, here Misha was, seated between two Polish smugglers en route to the gate to the ghetto. Sentries patrolled a rough wooden scaffold, a massive stile over the crude brick wall, checking papers and searching everyone coming or going. Even from the foot of the scaffold one could smell the pestilence beyond, the reek of far too many human beings in far too small an enclosure, the calculus of slow death, in century-old tenements already desperate before the Germans came.

  “We will cross here,” Janek the driver announced as the lorry ground slowly up to the gate at Nalewki and Nowolipkie Streets. A medieval street scene of carts, soldiers, and dozens of people in all manner of clothing milled around a figure flailing on the cobbles. “Oh, whore’s breath,” Janek’s partner Karol muttered as he opened the lorry door, “an epilep. Gives me the creeps, when they go crazy. Hey, Markus!” he shouted, and a tall Wehrmacht soldier, a corporal, ambled over to the truck, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his face a stony study in uncaring; he must have been forty. Misha noticed he was missing half his right hand; he took Markus for a policeman done up as a soldier, and an old one at that.

  “Hey yourself,” the guard replied. “What have we here?”

  “An expensive package. Show him your papers, please.”

  The corporal scanned the Swedish documents and then fingered the four 500-zloty notes; they vanished. “Have them out in an hour, Karol, there’s going to be a roundup at four. Yid hit one of my guys with a brick on Muranowska last night, gave him a new place to part his hair. Go on, an hour,” he repeated, waving at the guard at the gate ahead with an indolent hand.

  They rolled through without a hitch, and Janek the driver aimed the truck right, to the east, easing through the throng. The ghetto streets were unbelievably crowded, Jews of every walk of life thrust together, shoulder to shoulder, six, even eight across on the sidewalk.

  “I have made all the arrangements,” Karol said, smoking, thinking. “Mild, aren’t they, these, Janek?” But Janek was trying to get the truck across Franciszkanska street without running over the kids who were screaming at him to stop.

  “What’s in the back?” Misha asked.

  “Cooking oil, potatoes, ass wipe for the hospital. Even some rice, because we’re good at what we do, aren’t we, Janek? You bet we are,” and he flashed his bridgework again.

  The truck stopped abruptly at number thirty-two, down the street from the Jewish hospital. “You have forty-five minutes,” Karol said, throwing open the door. “Be on the street, ready to go, or Janek will leave you here. When Markus at the gate says an hour, he means an hour.”

  Miriam nearly fainted when she saw her son; she took almost ten minutes to pack while he watched and agonized at the junk she was bringing as well as the treasures,
the last four family photographs of his birth-father’s parents in Riga, and a single silver-framed portrait of her mother, taken in a Paris restaurant in 1912.

  Halfway down the stairs, a lad with no shoes and a girl of perhaps ten with perfect limpid eyes, sister and brother, begged Misha to take them too. The boy had to be taken away, screaming; the sister stood mute, with such a look of pain in her eyes that Misha knew her face would haunt him till he stopped drawing breath. Miriam gave the girl a few greasy zlotys from her stocking, the last of her money, kissed her on the cheek, and then tore herself away from the staring child.

  An old woman reached out from a crowd of people standing watching on the pavement. “Go! And God go with you! But do not forget us!” she called out.

  Karol was two minutes early. At the ghetto gate he had to bribe a Jewish “blue policeman” not to steal Miriam’s few photographs for the salvage value of their silver frames. Here they eat their own too, Misha thought as the truck ground through the checkpoint.

  It passed like a dream. Five minutes later they were on the Aryan side, the big truck empty except for Miriam’s meager belongings, rolling down the spacious Kraków Boulevard as if no one had a care in the world, Miriam on Misha’s lap, her disbelieving face tracked with tears. Even garrulous Karol shut up in the face of her sorrow.

  “They’re all finished,” she said, over and over, “all finished.”

  The Austrian had refused the more battered American bills. He examined the clean notes only—there were counterfeits about. He slipped the packet of clean twenty-dollar bills into his boot; the rest went into a dun envelope marked, for some occult reason, Futur in block Gothic type, then he walked back to his pine hut and its smoking tin chimney, his ersatz coffee and real schnapps. With two full jerricans in the trunk, they had enough diesel for nearly a thousand kilometers; Misha had done the math on the back of an envelope.

  They drove west, fast, fast as the Daimler’s gasping engine would go—the wall-eyed mechanic had told Misha the car had once belonged to the mayor of Warsaw—straight down the center line of the two-lane Polish highway. They halted only for the floodlit checkpoints manned by bored middle-aged men in field gray, barbers and cobblers and cooks and typists too old to fight the Russians. At Poznan, Misha sidestepped trouble by handing over his last package of Camels, a twenty-dollar bill tucked among the cigarettes.

  The Polish-German frontier detained them an hour, while phone calls went back and forth and rain drizzled down on a no-man’s-land lit by arc lights that gleamed on the Daimler’s slick hood. Miriam slept, waking only for more soup from a steel canister. They headed south-southwest, down the curving sweep of the autobahn just inside the Austrian border, into the foothills. They were both wrapped in blankets, the diesel roaring flat out as the autobahn gave way to the mountain roads switchbacking toward the border, now fourteen hours on the road.

  Miriam woke at dawn on the second day. They stopped at a churchyard, somewhere near Rottweil, the map said. Misha, scrupulous about such things, shaved in the car mirror, while Miriam wandered off, nearly getting lost in the thick Alpine mist. They shared the last of the coffee and departed. The sugar and the caffeine kept Misha driving at a steady 110 kilometers an hour onto the Schaffhausen plain.

  They’d reached the last German village before the Swiss border, a depressing place full of filthy trucks and great herds of sheep led by dogs, and tired, unsmiling men in oilcloth coats, old men, hawk-faced veterans of the first war who stared at the two Jews in a rich man’s car, their eyes rimed with suspicion. “Your father,” Miriam began as the Daimler idled at the border crossing, “was not the kind of man to say he loved you. But he loved you very much. He was proud of you.”

  Her rings, the diamonds and emeralds and earrings and all her jewelry were long gone. He’d never seen her before without her precious things; here she was, pale and tired, but her dignity intact. “He told me,” Miriam continued, her hands wrapped around the metal mug of the last of the soup, “just before he died, that he wanted you to be the rabbi he hadn’t been.”

  A bead of sweat crept down Misha’s spine. “What would he think of me now?” he wondered aloud, leaning on the steering wheel as they waited in a long queue of vehicles, the Daimler’s windows fogging over. He had the passports and visas and letters of transit ready, piled neatly on the metal dashboard; he’d picked them up once or twice, the nerves getting to him, until Miriam, full of a fatalist’s calm, wisely put the papers in her lap.

  Misha stared straight ahead. “He wouldn’t have left. He loved Riga. He’d’ve hated that I left. That you left. And I’m no rabbi, any more than he was a plumber.”

  “The dogs … look.” The Dobermans leapt, snarling, at the full length of their leashes, pointing. A lorry driver was now spread-eagled against his cab while the dogs roared at him. Misha watched as the small drama played itself out on the floodlit borderline, two men in coveralls clawing off the ribs of the crate planking with well-used hammers.

  “He’s had his chips, that one,” Misha announced, dropping the Daimler into gear. Ahead, another lorry’s engine turned over; the queue inched forward, tendrils of exhaust trailing up as the clutches caught. He made a mental note to cable Eleanor from Schaffhausen—two words, she’d asked of him: Krumme Lanke.

  His mother touched his arm. “It will end, one day, this,” Miriam said flatly. “And we’ll breathe again.” She looked at her son. The guards were dragging the lorry driver away, the toes of his worn boots bouncing off the rough gravel.

  Misha looked neither right nor left as the Daimler’s unprotesting tires pulled them forward, toward the clean clean air of Switzerland.

  XXXIII

  WASHINGTON

  DECEMBER 7, 1941

  Mrs. Whyte’s elderly cook was sobbing: Eleanor could hear her through the thick oak swing door to the kitchen. Outside on K Street, nothing moved. Churchgoers had returned home to the news, bits and pieces from Hawaii and Washington, reports fractured and molten. The radio, a big square Goodyear Mrs. Whyte favored for her Metropolitan opera broadcasts, glowed dully in the mid-afternoon December gloom, a spray of jonquils atop its polished cabinet.

  Eleanor had been strolling, oblivious, on K Street just before noon, bringing Sophie back from a long walk in the park, their bag of bread crumbs for the milling pigeons empty. A gangly newsboy in black high-top sneakers ran past them, an armload of copies of the Post’s flash edition against his chest, shouting “Japs bomb Pearl!” in a piping voice at the stunned passersby. Mrs. Whyte’s house was only half a block away; Eleanor headed there as the first air-raid sirens began to sound in the distance, murmuring a word of thanks that Misha and his mother had reached Switzerland and safety two days before.

  “Mommy, what’s happening?” Sophie asked as they climbed the big stone steps of Grace Dunlop’s girlhood house.

  “I’m not sure yet, dear,” Eleanor said carefully. “Let’s find out at Mrs. Whyte’s, shall we? Perhaps she’ll have a cherry ice, like last time.”

  Sophie, too shrewd for this misdirection, didn’t answer. They knocked and heard Mrs. Whyte’s bawled “Come!” from deep within. The ancient staff were fewer and the vast blood-red Iranian carpets still dusty and the thick yeasty smell of dog still hung everywhere in the hothouse air. Mrs. Whyte still padded about in a strange mix of nightclothes and formal wear, her pearls at her neck, a Spode teacup leaking crème de menthe as she came to greet them. “They’ve bombed us! Those awful Japs,” she railed, passing the side parlor’s gallery—“the museum,” Grace had called it, chock-full of Old Masters—without so much as a glance at Eleanor and Sophie. A tall gentleman in a sharp gray suit was paying very close attention to one of the pictures. He moved on, taking down the next work and examining its back before returning it to the wall and moving into the high-ceilinged main room to join them.

  “Ellie,” she said, exhaling peppermint, “you remember Jimmy Kronthal, of the Philadelphia Kronthals? Come here, near to the radio, Jimmy. Glenda, bring u
s all tea, the Lapsang, if you please.” Mrs. Whyte was in her element, crisis being the family birthright. The elderly maid, her eyes red-rimmed, shuffled off to the kitchen in silence, weighed down by her empty tray.

  “The Yale man and art expert. Nice to see you again, Mr. Kronthal.”

  “Especially so, given the dire circumstances, Miss Dulles.”

  “I expect you’ll be leaving the art business for the duration, Mr. Kronthal,” Eleanor said.

  “I already have. I’ve volunteered to work at your brother Allen’s shop, at the Coordinator of Information’s office. Started in October.”

  “Oh, that. That’s hush-hush, isn’t it?” Mrs. Whyte inquired, her eyes gleaming.

  “It is at that,” Kronthal replied. “Mrs. Whyte, may I have a word with you in private, please?”

  “Certainly, my dear,” Mrs. Whyte said, sashaying to the big French double doors to the picture gallery, Kronthal in tow. The beautiful doors snicked shut. Clearly Kronthal was Mrs. Whyte’s painting knacker: Eleanor and Sophie and Pearl Harbor had wandered into that Sunday’s transaction. Across the room the radio crackled on; a reporter in Seattle was reading the wire copy from Honolulu in monotone. The phones were down, he said, and the only news getting out of Hawaii arrived via clattering undersea telex.

  “Sophie,” Eleanor asked as she watched Mrs. Whyte stalk the carpet between the side parlor’s two grand windows, weighing Kronthal’s estimates, “do you want to play with the dolls upstairs?”

  Sophie, wide-eyed, shook her head no, all thoughts of cherry ices long gone. Eleanor pulled her close and sat next to her on the sofa, an evil-smelling maroon thing big as a barge, which groaned like a cheap coffin whenever Eleanor shifted. Mr. Whyte had been in railroads, Eleanor recalled, an endeavor that led to great booms—her railway bonds bought Grace all manner of freedom—and equally dire busts. The Depression had not been good to Mr. Whyte, his rail lines spinning off red ink; then, two years ago, a massive refinancing in the offing, he chose a fine moment to die, triggering a bankruptcy and leaving Mrs. Whyte an astonishing art collection and equally astonishing debts. One by one, the widow Whyte was selling off the Degas sketches and the Matisses to fend off her late husband’s creditors.