Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  They went back along the path to the church and found the village priest in the vestry. He was a young man, not much older than Shasa, and Centaine was disappointed for his youth seemed to her a break in her tenuous link to Michael and the past. However, she wrote out two large cheques, one for the repairs to the church’s copper spire, and the other to pay for fresh flowers to be placed on Michael’s grave each Sunday in perpetuity, and they went back to the Daimler with the priest’s fervent benedictions following them.

  The following day they all drove on to Paris; Centaine had wired ahead for accommodation at the Ritz in the Place Vendôme.

  Blaine and Centaine had a full round of engagements – meetings, luncheons and dinners – with various members of the French government, so the four younger members of the party were left to their own devices and they very soon discovered that Paris was the city of romance and excitement.

  They rode to the first étage of the Eiffel Tower in one of the creaking elevators and then raced each other up the open steel staircase to the very top and ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ at the city spread below them. They strolled with arms linked along the footpath on the riverbank and under the fabulous bridges of the Seine. With her baby box Brownie, Tara photographed them on the steps of Montmartre with the Sacré Coeur as a backdrop; they drank coffee and ate croissants in the sidewalk cafés and lunched at the Café de la Paix, dined at La Coupole and saw La Traviata at the Opéra.

  At midnight when the girls had said goodnight to Centaine and their father and retired demurely and dutifully to their room, Shasa and David smuggled them out over the balcony and they went dancing in the boites on the Left Bank or sat listening to jazz in the cellars of Montparnasse, where they discovered a black trombone player who blew a horn that made your spine curl and a little brasserie where you could eat snails and wild strawberries at three in the morning.

  In the last dawn, as they crept down the corridor to get the girls back to their room, they heard familiar voices in the elevator cage as it came up to their floor, and only just in time the four of them dived down the staircase and lay in a heap on the first landing, the girls stuffing handkerchiefs into their mouths to stifle their giggles, while just above them Blaine and Centaine, resplendent in full evening dress and oblivious of their presence, left the elevator and arm in arm strolled down the passage towards Centaine’s suite.

  They left Paris with regret and reached the German border in high spirits. They presented their passports to the French douaniers and were waved through to the German side with typical Gallic panache. They left the Bentley and Daimler parked at the barrier and trooped into the German border post where they were struck immediately by the difference in attitude between the two groups of officials.

  The two German officers were meticulously turned out, their leather polished to a gloss, their caps set at the exact regulation angle and the black swastikas in a field of crimson and white on their left arms. From the wall behind their desk, a framed portrait of the Führer, stern and moustached, glowered down upon them.

  Blaine laid the sheaf of passports on the desk top in front of them with a friendly ‘Guten Tag, mein Herr’, and stood chatting to Centaine while one of the officials went through the passports one at a time, comparing each of the holders to his or her photograph and then stamping the visa with the black eagle and swastika device, before going on to the next document.

  Dave Abrahams’ passport was at the bottom of the pile, and when the officer came to it, he paused and re-read the front cover and then pedantically turned and perused every single page in the document, looking up at David again and scrutinizing his features after each page. After a few minutes of this the group around David fell silent and began exchanging puzzled glances.

  ‘I think something is wrong, Blaine,’ Centaine said quietly, and he went back to the desk.

  ‘Problem?’ Blaine asked, and the official answered him in stilted but correct English.

  ‘Abrahams, it is a Jewish name, no?’

  Blaine flushed with irritation, but before he could reply David stepped up to the desk beside him. ‘It’s a Jewish name, yes!’ he said quietly, and the official nodded thoughtfully, tapping the passport with his forefinger.

  ‘You admit you are Jewish?’

  ‘I am Jewish,’ David replied in the same level tone.

  ‘It is not written in your passport that you are Jewish,’ the customs officer pointed out.

  ‘Should it be?’ David asked. The officer shrugged, then asked, ‘You wish to enter Germany – and you are Jewish?’

  ‘I wish to enter Germany to take part in the Olympic Games, to which I have been invited by the German government.’

  ‘Ah! You are an Olympic athlete – a Jewish Olympic athlete?’

  ‘No, I am a South African Olympic athlete. Is my visa in order?’

  The official did not reply to the question. ‘Wait here, please.’ He went through the rear door, carrying David’s passport with him.

  They heard him speaking to someone in the back office, and they all looked at Tara. She was the only one in the party who understood a little German, she had studied the language for her matriculation examinations and passed it on the Higher Grade.

  ‘What is he saying?’ Blaine asked.

  ‘They are talking too fast – a lot about “Jews” and “Olympics”,’ Tara answered, then the rear door opened and the original official came back with a plump rosy-faced man who was clearly his superior, for his uniform and his manner were grander.

  ‘Who is Abrahams?’ he demanded.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You are a Jew? You admit you are a Jew?’

  ‘Yes, I am a Jew. I have said so many times. Is there something wrong with my visa?’

  ‘You will wait, please.’ This time all three officials retired to the rear office, once more taking David’s passport with them. They heard the tinkle of a telephone bell, and then the senior officer’s voice, loud and obsequious.

  ‘What’s going on?’ They looked to Tara.

  ‘He’s talking to somebody in Berlin,’ Tara told them. ‘He’s explaining about David.’

  The one-sided conversation in the next room ended with ‘Jawohl, mein Kapitän,’ repeated four times, each time louder, and then a shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ and the tinkle of the telephone.

  The three officials filed back into the front office. The rosy-faced superior stamped David’s passport and handed it to him with a flourish.

  ‘Welcome to the Third Reich!’ he declared, and flung his right hand up, palm open, and extended towards them, and shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  Mathilda Janine burst into nervous giggles, ‘Isn’t he a lark!’ Blaine seized her arm and marched her out of the office.

  So they drove into Germany, all of them silent and subdued.

  They found lodgings in the first roadside inn, and contrary to her usual custom, Centaine accepted them without first inspecting the beds, the plumbing and the kitchens. After dinner nobody wanted to play cards or explore the village and they were in bed before ten o’clock.

  However, by breakfast time they had recovered their high spirits, and Mathilda Janine had them laughing with a poem she had composed in honour of the extraordinary feats that her father, Shasa and David were about to perform in the Games ahead of them.

  Their good humour increased during the day’s easy journey through the beautiful German countryside, the villages and hilltop castles right out of the pages of Hans Andersen fairy tales, the forests of pine trees in dark contrast to the open meadows and the tumbling rivers crossed by arched bridges of stone. Along the way they saw groups of young people in national dress, the boys in lederhosen and feathered loden hats, the girls in dirndls, who waved and called greetings as the two big motor cars sped past.

  They lunched in an inn full of people and music and laughter, on a haunch of wild boar with roast potatoes and apples and drank a Moselle with the taste of the grape and sunshine in its pale greenish depths. />
  ‘Everybody is so happy and prosperous-looking,’ Shasa remarked as he glanced around the crowded room.

  ‘The only country in the world with no unemployment and no poor,’ Centaine agreed, but Blaine tasted his wine and said nothing.

  That afternoon they entered the northern plain on the approach to Berlin, and Shasa, who was leading, swung the Daimler off onto the verge so suddenly that David grabbed for the dashboard and the girls in the back squeaked with alarm.

  Shasa jumped out, leaving the engine still running, shouting ‘David! David! Just look at them – aren’t they the most beautiful things you have ever seen.’ The others piled out beside him and stared up at the sky, while Blaine pulled the Bentley in behind the Daimler and he and Centaine climbed out to join them, shading their eyes against the slanting sun.

  There was an airfield adjoining the highway. The hangar buildings were painted silver and the windsock waved its long white arm in the small breeze. A stick of three fighter aircraft turned out of the sun, coming around in formation to line up for the strip. They were sleek as sharks, their bellies and lower wings painted sky blue, their upper surfaces speckled with camouflage and the boss of their propellers bright yellow.

  ‘What are they?’ Blaine called across to the two young pilots, and they answered as one:

  ‘109s.’

  ‘Messerschmitts.’

  The machine-gun snouts bristled from the leading edges of the wings, and the eyes of the cannon peered malevolently from the centre of the spinning propeller bosses.

  ‘What I’d give to fly one of those!’

  ‘An arm—’

  ‘And a leg—’

  And my hope of salvation!’

  The three fighters changed formation into line astern and descended towards the airfield.

  ‘They say that they can do 350 mph, straight and level—’

  ‘Oh sweet! Oh sweet! Look at them fly!’

  The girls were infected by their excitement, and they clapped and laughed, as the war machines passed low over their heads and touched down on the airstrip only a few hundred yards beyond.

  ‘It would be worth going to war, just to get a shot at flying something like that,’ Shasa exulted, and Blaine turned back to the Bentley to hide his sudden anger at the remark.

  Centaine slid into the seat beside him and they drove in silence for five minutes before she said: ‘He’s so young and foolish sometimes – I’m sorry, Blaine, I know how he upset you.’

  He sighed. ‘We were the same. We called it “a great game” and thought it was going to be the glory of a lifetime that would make us men and heroes. Nobody told us about the ripped guts and the terror and how dead men smell on the fifth day in the sun.’

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ Centaine said, fiercely. ‘Please don’t let it happen again!’ In her mind’s eye she saw once again the burning aircraft, with the body of the man she loved, blackening and twisting and crisping; then the face was no longer Michael’s but that of his only son, and Shasa’s beautiful face burst open like a sausage held too close to the flames and the sweet young life juices burst from it.

  ‘Please stop the car, Blaine,’ she whispered. ‘I think I am going to be ill.’

  With hard driving they could have reached Berlin that night, but in one of the smaller towns that they were passing through the streets were decorated for some sort of celebration, and Centaine asked and was told that it was the festival of the local patron saint.

  ‘Oh Blaine, let’s stay over,’ she cried, and they joined in the festival.

  That afternoon there was a procession. An effigy of the saint was paraded through the narrow cobbled streets, and a band followed it, with angelic little blond girls in national dress, and small boys in uniform.

  ‘Those are the Hitler Youth,’ Blaine explained. ‘Something like old Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts, but with a much stronger emphasis on German national aspirations and patriotism.’

  After the parade there was torchlit dancing in the town square, and barrows serving foaming tankards of beer or glasses of Sekt, the German equivalent of champagne, and serving-girls with lace aprons and cheeks like ripe apples carrying overflowing platters of rich food, pigs’ trotters and veal, smoked mackerel and cheeses.

  They found a table at the corner of the square, and the revellers at the neighbouring tables called greetings and merry banter to them; and they drank beer and danced and beat time to the ‘oom-pa-pa’ band with their beer mugs.

  Then quite abruptly the atmosphere changed. The laughter around them became brittle and forced, and there was a wariness in the faces and eyes of revellers at the adjacent tables; the band began to play too loudly and the dancers became feverish in their exertions.

  Four men had entered the square. They wore brown uniforms with cross-straps over the chest and the ubiquitous swastika arm-bands. Their brown cloth caps with rounded peaks were pulled low and their leather chin straps were down. Each of them carried a small wooden collection box with a slot in the lid and they spread out and went to each of the tables.

  Everybody made a donation, but as they pushed their coins into the slot of the box, they avoided looking at the brown-uniformed collectors. Their laughter was forced and nervous, and they looked into their tankards or at their own hands until the collectors had passed on to the next table, when they exchanged relieved glances.

  ‘Who are these people?’ Centaine asked innocently, making no attempt to hide her interest.

  ‘They are the SA,’ Blaine replied. ‘Storm troopers, the bully boys of the National Socialist Party. Look at that one.’ The trooper he had chosen had the bland heavy face of a peasant, dull and brutal. ‘Is it not remarkable that there are always people to do this type of work – the need finds the man. Let us pray that his is not the face of the new Germany.’

  The storm trooper had noticed their unconcealed interest and he came directly to their table with that menacing deliberate swagger.

  ‘Papers!’ he said.

  ‘He wants our papers,’ Tara translated, and Blaine handed over his passport.

  ‘Ah! Foreign tourists.’ The storm trooper’s manner changed. He smiled ingratiatingly and handed back Blaine’s passport with a few pleasant words.

  ‘He says, welcome to the paradise of National Socialist Germany,’ Tara translated, and Blaine nodded.

  ‘He says, you will see how the German people are now happy and proud – and something else that I didn’t catch.’

  ‘Tell him we hope that they will always be happy and proud.’ The trooper beamed and clicked the heels of his jackboots as he sprang to attention.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ He gave the Nazi salute, and Mathilda Janine dissolved into helpless giggles.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ she gasped as Blaine gave her a sharp look and a shake of the head. ‘It just slays me when they do that.’

  The storm troopers left the square, and they could feel the tension ease; the band slackened its frenetic beat and the dancers slowed down. People looked directly at one another and smiled naturally.

  That night Centaine pulled the fat goose-down duvet up around her ears and snuggled into the curve of Blaine’s arm.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ she asked, ‘how the people here seemed caught between feverish laughter and nervous tears?’

  Blaine was silent for a while and then he grunted, ‘There is a smell in the air that troubles me – it seems to me that it is the stench of some deadly plague,’ and he shuddered slightly and drew her closer to him.

  With the Daimler leading, they streamed down the wide white autobahn into the suburbs of the German capital.

  ‘So much water, so many canals and so many trees.’

  ‘The city’s built on a series of canals,’ Tara explained. ‘Rivers trapped between the old terminal moraines that lie east to west—’

  ‘How is it you always know everything?’ Shasa interrupted her, a touch of real exasperation under his teasing tone.

  ‘Unlike some I could
name, I am actually literate, you know,’ she flashed back, and David winced theatrically.

  ‘Ouch, that hurt, and it wasn’t even aimed at me.’

  ‘Very well, little Miss Know-it-all,’ Shasa challenged. ‘If you are so clever, what does that sign say?’ He pointed ahead to a large white signboard beside the autobahn.

  The lettering was in black, and Tara read it aloud.

  ‘It says: “Jews! Keep straight on! This road will take you back to Jerusalem, where you belong!”’

  As she realized what she had said, she flushed with embarrassment and leaned forward to touch David’s shoulder over the back of his seat.

  ‘Oh David, I’m so sorry. I should never have uttered such rot!’

  David sat straight, staring ahead through the windscreen, and then after a few seconds he gave a thin little smile.

  ‘Welcome to Berlin,’ he whispered. ‘The centre of Aryan civilization.’

  ‘Welcome to Berlin! Welcome to Berlin!’ The train that had brought them across half of Europe slid into the station, clouds of steam hissing from the vacuum brakes and the cries of greeting almost drowned by the beat of the band playing a rousing martial air.

  ‘Welcome to Berlin!’ The waiting crowd surged forward at the moment their coach came to a standstill, and Manfred De La Rey stepped down from the balcony to be surrounded by well-wishers, smiling happy faces and friendly handclasps, laughing girls and wreaths of flowers, shouted questions and popping flash bulbs.

  The other athletes, all dressed like him in green blazers with gold piping, white slacks and shoes and Panama hats, were also surrounded and mobbed and it was some minutes before a loud voice rose above the hubbub.

  ‘Attention, please! May I have your attention.’ The band beat out a ruffle of drums while a tall man in a dark uniform and steelrimmed spectacles stepped forward.

  ‘First of all let me offer you the warm greetings of the Führer and the German people, and we welcome you to these the eleventh Olympic Games of the modern era. We know that you will represent the spirit and courage of the South African nation, and we wish you all success and many, many medals.’ Amidst clapping and laughing, the speaker held up his hands. ‘There are motor vehicles waiting to take you to your quarters in the Olympic village, where you will find all preparations have been made to make your stay with us both memorable and enjoyable. Now it is my pleasant duty to introduce the young lady who will be your guide and your interpreter over the next few weeks.’ He beckoned to somebody in the crowd, and a young woman stepped out into the space beside him and turned to face the band of athletes. There was a collective sigh and hum of appreciation.