The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  “But Zilberman,” Varian said. “And the Flight Portfolio—”

  Danny shook his head. “Don’t do this, Varian.”

  “The Flight Portfolio has to be somewhere. If we can find it still—”

  “You saved more than a thousand lives,” Danny said. “There’s your Flight Portfolio. It’s already doing its work in the world. The rest is gone. Leave it.”

  And he did. He held Danny close for a moment longer, then bent to Theo and kissed her twice. He shook Jean’s hand, pressed Lucie Heymann’s cheek with his own. And then he climbed aboard the railway car and took his seat. His friends stood in a silent cluster on the platform. He drew his camera from his bag, lowered the window, and photographed them. Then he put his head against the window glass and waited, and in another moment the train began to move, out of the broken and complicated light that was France and into the dark of the tunnel.

  40

  Morningside Heights

  A great roaring, like the rush of water down the Niagara; a great glimmering, thousands upon thousands of windows pushing up into the sky; smell of garbage, smell of roasting nuts, ammoniac stink of tar, sweet cloud of gasoline, burning leaves from the park, popcorn scent from the open cinema doors: here was the city that insisted on calling itself his home, flashing past outside the open cab window like the childhood tongue-twister, unique New York, younique younork, newyique newyork, all of it a wild blur, all of it strange and intimately known to him. The sound of jazz and taxi horns and newsboys’ extras, the snort of gasoline-powered buses, the panicked cries of men hoisting a piano on a crane, a woman’s descending laugh: he could have recognized it anywhere, his city’s particular birdsong. Here he was, fresh from the airfield—the waterfield—where the Yankee Clipper had sent its fantastic wings of spray into the warm early-autumn sky; here he was on Broadway, drifting northward toward Columbia, making his stuttering way through the traffic, past glitter-shot sidewalks jammed with men and women in dark broadcloth and plaid and silk, past familiar-seeming faces of every shade—here, not in France or Spain or Portugal; here in America, in Manhattan, moving uptown through a city oblivious to his absence and unaware of his return.

  No one had come to meet him at the airport. Eileen knew he was arriving today, but not when to expect him. Despite his exhaustion, despite the burn in his gut and the pain in his temples, he had instructed the driver to take him here, to Morningside Heights, up Broadway to 116th Street. They pulled up at the entrance to the quad, and he paid the fare, the American coins heavy in his hand. The driver got out and lifted his suitcase from the trunk. Then he was gone, leaving Varian alone on the pavement.

  Before him stood the tall iron portal with its ascending arcs of black spikes, its twin electric lanterns: In lumine tuo videbimus lumen. Along the walk, dogwoods radiated shameless crimson; beyond them, plane trees jazzed their yellow hands at students in woolen scarves and caps. The gates of this campus had always seemed to open into a different sphere, an alter-city where beauty turned inward instead of out, where the architecture was composed of theorem and proof, of word and number and idea. The quiet cadence of lectures, overheard through open windows, made a subtle background music. On afternoons like these, warm enough for sitting outdoors, students gathered on the steps of Low Library in various attitudes of rest or ease or argument, radiating a quiet sense of privilege, of belonging.

  Now the campus seemed to him a changed place; now the meditative hush of the quad seemed a veneer, nothing more than expensive and transparent drag. Inside one of these buildings, Grant had stood before a group of deans and fellow professors who had passed judgment on him, one way or another. He hadn’t cabled the result to Varian; he hadn’t communicated anything to him at all. Had he been sent packing, or could he be in his office even now? The thought of it—of Grant so close at hand—brought on a wave of vertigo, as if he might fall off the sidewalk and down into an unimaginable abyss.

  He crossed in front of the library and climbed a set of stone stairs to Fayerweather Hall, the building where he’d heard Jay Allen speak some years ago on the subject of Badajoz. A walnut-paneled elevator lifted him to the third floor, where the doors opened upon the Department of History. On the wall beside the office hung a glass case, inside of which was a faculty directory and a schedule of courses; from these he learned that G. KATZNELSON would teach in forty minutes, and was holding office hours now in F401.

  The office was ten steps away down that echoing hall. He could hear, through the frosted pane of the door, two voices inside: one a youthful, insistent treble; the other a familiar basso. He leaned against the wall and rested his suitcase at his feet. A clock, mounted on the wall near the office door, dripped its seconds like water through a pinhole. His heart had begun to race, his hands to sweat; he didn’t have to do this at all, he told himself. He could flee downtown, come back tomorrow once he’d washed and eaten and slept, or never come back again. But then the doorknob turned, and out came a freshman in a pale blue beanie, carrying a stack of books under his arm.

  “All yours,” the boy said, and Varian lifted his suitcase and went in.

  Gregor Katznelson sat in an armchair by the window, dressed just as he had been when Varian had last seen him: in a suit jacket cut short and buttoned high on the chest, a woolen waistcoat, the crispest of white shirts. His dark hair stood up from his forehead in unruly points; his broad shoulders looked weighted by some grief, and his eyes were hung with shadows. At the sight of Varian in the doorway, he got to his feet and held the back of his chair, steadying himself as if for a blow. The skin around his eyes faded to a violet-tinged white, and the parentheses at the corners of his mouth deepened.

  “So you’ve come home from France,” he said.

  “I was refoulé,” Varian said. “That’s the vulgar-sounding term they use for it.”

  Katznelson glanced at Varian’s suitcase. “Can it be that you’ve come directly from the airport? Aren’t there others who might be anxious to see you?”

  “I wanted to speak to you, Gregor.”

  The professor’s large dark eyes narrowed, his expression hardening. “Speak, then. I’m listening.”

  “I have a simple question to ask you. A question about your son.”

  “Of course,” Katznelson said. “Ask anything. I am greatly in your debt, Mr. Fry, where Tobias is concerned.” He gestured toward the armchair that stood beside his own, and Varian approached. He wished Katznelson had been seated instead behind his massive wooden desk; these companionable armchairs seemed to set a tone inappropriate to what he’d come to say. But he had no choice but to sit, resting the suitcase at his feet, and Katznelson sat down beside him. The professor removed his rimless glasses, drew a cloth from his breast pocket, and rubbed the lenses, taking his time, holding the glasses up to the light to check their clarity.

  “Tobias is in Cambridge, as you may have guessed,” Katznelson said, replacing the glasses on the bridge of his nose. “I would prefer him to be here in New York, but he seems, if I may say so, content.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Varian said. “He’s a fine young man.”

  “Now, please, Mr. Fry, what question did you come to ask?”

  He had struggled for some time with how to frame it; now that the moment had come, now that he and Katznelson were sitting here knee to knee in this office, he found that his preparation had fled. A long moment passed before he could speak.

  “Why did you lie about Tobias?” he said, finally. “Why did you lie to Grant, and induce him to lie to me?”

  Katznelson received the question without apparent anger or surprise. He held Varian in an uncomfortably direct stare, one that allowed no reversals. “What makes you so certain I did?”

  “Lev Zilberman told me the truth. He was apprehended by the police some days after I put Tobias on the Sinaïa. It was supposed to be Zilberman on that boat, on his way to safety. Instead I gave
his spot to your son, and Zilberman was arrested. When I went to see him in jail, he asked me why we’d gone to such lengths to help a boy like Tobias. Not a genius, not a prodigy—not even a particularly distinguished student, to hear him tell it. Just a Berlin undergraduate who’d helped his friend in the lab. Yes, he told me about Heligman, too. The boy who lost his life.”

  “Elliott preceded you here,” Katznelson said. “He came some weeks ago, making the same accusation.” He turned his eyes away for a moment, toward the streams of students passing along the brick walkway below. “Let’s say you’re right. Let us say my son was merely an underling at the Institut, a drudge. Let’s say he had no more than ordinary intelligence, and I appealed to you to help him. Would you have considered him worth saving?”

  “I had a mission,” Varian said. “A specific mission. Funds committed to the rescuing of a small group of exceptional individuals. Whether”—and he swallowed, reluctant to cede any ground at all, though it had to be said—“whether that was right or not. I had a mandate from my organization.”

  “Knowing your mandate, Mr. Fry—knowing how your organization chose whom to help—what father would not have bent the truth to save his son’s life?”

  “Lev Zilberman is dead,” Varian said. “And the lie you told could easily have killed your son, too. The Nazis aren’t immune to rumors, and Vichy does their bidding. Your son was arrested in Marseille and thrown into a concentration camp at Vernet. A camp where prisoners were starved, brutalized, shot.”

  Katznelson sat a long moment in silence, his hand curled at his mouth. “This is a tragedy,” he said finally. “Zilberman’s death. It is a loss to the world. But Tobias is alive, here in America. He is free to walk down the street and buy a book or drink a cup of coffee or stroll in the park, thank God.” His voice had fallen to a graveled whisper; Varian had to lean forward to hear him. “There are different kinds of intelligence, Mr. Fry. There is the kind that ignites everything in its path. And then there is another kind, one that grows slowly, spreading a more subtle illumination. Planck could not yet see what my son had. He preferred Heligman’s brand of brilliance. But I saw it. It was in him since birth. You might have caught a glimpse of it too, living as close to him as you did, if you had not been a slave to the other sort.”

  Varian was exhausted already, near-cracked from the dread of this conversation and what would follow it. He couldn’t bear to return in his mind to Tobias Katznelson at Air Bel, to the image of him crouched beside a streamlet, his hand plunged into the soil to extract hibernating snails; to the image of him shirtless in his attic room, diagramming the physics of butterflies’ wings. If he went to that place, if he imagined Tobias there, he would have to think of Zilberman too, the physical reality of him; he would have to think of all that had been lost.

  Katznelson removed his glasses again. He blinked at the sunlight, then pressed the corners of his eyes for a moment before he went on. “I served my country in the Great War,” he said. “I was wounded at the Somme. I suffered terribly. My comrades and I nearly starved. The provisions we had were not sufficient to sustain us. In every war, Mr. Fry, there are casualties. Some of us must lose our lives.” He tilted his glasses toward the window, reflecting shards of light from the lenses. “I knew Lev Zilberman’s work. I knew it well. And I knew what the Nazis thought of him. If you believe they would have allowed him to reach these shores, you are very much mistaken. They never would have let him off the continent alive.”

  “But I had a way for him, Gregor! He would have gotten out on that boat. We could have found another way for your son.”

  “Zilberman’s loss is a tragedy. But it was inevitable, Mr. Fry. And I saved my son’s life. Can you blame me for that?”

  “I saved your son’s life! I saved him. And Grant saved him, and a woman named Mary Jayne Gold, and Captain Jacques Deschamps of the Sinaïa, if you care to know. And I would have done what I did for Tobias no matter what he was, if Grant had come to me and asked me to do it. I wouldn’t have refused him anything in the world. But when Zilberman told me your son wasn’t what I thought he was, it was Grant I called a liar. Grant.”

  Katznelson shook his head. “I don’t care to hear any more. I have no desire to be punished for this again, any of it.” He looked up at Varian, the pallor beneath his eyes making him seem almost transparent. “Have I not paid a high enough price? My child is alive. But I lost—you know what it is I lost.” His eyes narrowed, and he went on in a lower, fiercer tone. “And Elliott paid too. He paid for renewing his liaison with you. Perhaps you’ve heard that he was dismissed from his position here. It must have been you, Mr. Fry, who prevailed upon him to tell them. He was happy here, happy in his work. But you are a dealer in absolutes, one who refuses to acknowledge that we shade the truth every day of our lives. Relativism is a fact of human life, and has been from our earliest days.” He swept an arm toward the volumes on his office shelves, histories, hundreds of them. “Adherence to absolutes destroys countries, ruins lives. Evidence the Führer’s current plan. You don’t need a doctorate to understand that.”

  Varian looked into Katznelson’s eyes—Tobias’s eyes, cast in a darker hue—and forced himself to be calm. “Grant was the one who decided to write to Butler,” he said. “Not me.”

  “I will never believe you had no influence.”

  “Believe what you want. It’s the truth.”

  “And what now?” Katznelson said. “Will you go to him now and make your apologies?” He shook his head slowly. “It’s funny, you know. Funny that it took you so long to realize what I’d done. Had you been a father—had either of you been fathers—you would have seen it at once.”

  “It was a father who revealed the truth to me,” Varian said. And then his exhaustion seemed to hit him all at once, to press him down under a crushing weight, and he longed to be home in bed—not here in New York, not on Irving Place, but in Marseille, in his white-walled room at Air Bel, Grant breathing beside him in the dark.

  “I’m glad, Professor, that your son is safe,” he managed to say.

  “I thank you for that,” Katznelson said.

  “I do understand. I understand why you did what you did.”

  Katznelson nodded again, and ran a hand under his eyes. “You must know, too, that your presence is painful to me. I must ask you to leave me now.”

  And he did. He had another stop to make before he could go home to face Eileen.

  * * *

  ________

  Ten minutes’ walk down Broadway. A right on 112th, then one long block to West End Avenue. In his hand was the slip of paper on which Grant had written his address; at his wrist, the silver nautilus. He went into the building—built in the twenties, but still in good taste: dark marble floors, walnut paneling, orange dahlias in a malachite urn—and paused at the desk, where an attendant presided over a gleaming phone.

  “Twelve B,” Varian said. “Grant.”

  “Grant,” the man said slowly, as if trying to remember where he’d heard the name. “Grant.” He lifted the receiver, hesitated, dialed. A terrible silence followed. Varian’s pulse rocketed. At last the attendant said, “Yes, Mr. Grant, someone here to see you.” He lifted his eyes toward Varian. “Name?”

  “Tell him it’s Tom Fry.”

  The attendant did. Another silence followed, one that seemed to stretch on forever. Finally the attendant raised an eyebrow and said, “All right, sir, will do,” and put down the phone.

  “Well?” Varian said.

  “You can go on up.”

  His temples thrumming, his diaphragm constricting his lungs, he went to the elevator, and the lift operator conducted him to the floor where Grant lived.

  A polished black-tiled hallway. Dove-gray wallpaper. A line of doors. At the end of the hall a door like all the others, black, with a silver knocker and a silver number. Varian raised his hand to press t
he bell, but then the door opened and there stood Grant.

  He had not vanished, had not dematerialized. He stood before Varian in a white open-collared shirt and gray wool trousers, barefoot, his hair damp from the shower, his tie hanging loose around his neck, a solitary pearl of shaving cream on his earlobe. His pale eyes resting, at last, on Varian’s own.

  “You might give a man a little warning,” he said, quietly.

  “I came from the airport, Skiff. I didn’t think to call. Hey, you’ve—you’ve got a bit of shaving cream just there.”

  Grant pinched the pearl of foam away. “You landed just now?”

  “I went to see Gregor at his office.” He glanced over Grant’s shoulder, down the hallway of the apartment, toward the light that fell through a south-facing window. “Skiff—must we talk in a doorway? Are you going to ask me in?”

  “I don’t know,” Grant said. “Depends on why you’re here.” A tease flashed in his eye for an instant, a fragment of humor.

  “I’ve come to beg your forgiveness,” Varian said.

  “Well, don’t beg in the hall, Tommie. It’s degrading.” He held the door open and ushered Varian in. Then he moved away toward the center of the apartment, and Varian followed, as if into the cavern of a dream. The floor was blond parquet, the walls bare white, and in the high-windowed sitting room everything was simple and clean and plain. A piano raised its black sail in a block of sun near the far wall; on the low coffee table lay a photograph album and a few 78s in their sleeves. Two geometric armchairs, fawn-colored, stood on a rug of ivory wool. There were thousands of old books in ceiling-high bookcases, and, above the mantel, a cubist painting in black and orange and white: a man’s body refracted through burning waters. At the edge of the rug lay a pair of blue Moroccan slippers.