by Herman Wouk
“Maybe I’ve had too much of it,” he said. “I started out fascinated. I’m ending up snowed under and bored. I realize much of the art is brilliant, but there’s a lot of overrated garbage amid the works of genius. My main objection is that I can’t take the mixture of paganism and Christianity. I don’t believe David looked like Apollo, or Moses like Jupiter, or Mary like every Renaissance artist’s mistress with a borrowed baby on her lap. Maybe they couldn’t help showing Bible Jews as local Italians or pseudo-Greeks, but—” Byron dried up for a moment, seeing his listeners’ amused looks. “Look, I’m not saying any of this is important criticism. I guess it just shows I got into the wrong field. But what has any of it to do with Christianity? That’s what sticks in my craw. Supposing Christ came back to earth and visited the Uffizi, or Saint Peter’s? The Christ of your book, Dr. Jastrow, the poor idealistic Jewish preacher from the back hills? That’s the Lord I grew up with. My father’s a religious man; we had to read a chapter of the Bible every morning at home. Why, Christ wouldn’t even suspect the stuff related to himself and his teachings.” Natalie Jastrow was regarding him with an almost motherly smile. He said brusquely to her, “Okay. You asked me what I had against the Italian Renaissance. I’ve told you.”
“Well, it’s a point of view,” she said.
Eyes twinkling behind his glasses, Slote lit his pipe, and said between puffs, “Don’t fold up, Byron, there are others who have taken your position. A good name for it is Protestantism.”
“Byron’s main point is accurate.” Dr. Jastrow sounded kindly, dancing his little fingers together. “The Italian Renaissance was a great blossoming of art and ideas, Byron, that occurred when paganism and the Hebrew spirit—in its Christian expression—briefly fertilized instead of fighting each other. It was a hybrid growth, true, but some hybrids are stronger than either parent, you know. Witness the mule.”
“Yes, sir,” said Byron, “and mules are sterile.”
Amused surprise flashed on Natalie Jastrow’s face, and her enormous dark eyes flickered to Leslie Slote, and back to Byron.
“Well said. Just so.” Jastrow nodded in a pleased way. “The Renaissance indeed couldn’t reproduce itself, and it died off, while the pagan and Hebrew spirits went their separate immortal ways. But that mule’s bones are now one of mankind’s richest deposits of cultural achievement, Byron, whatever your momentary disgust from overexposure.”
Byron shrugged. Leslie Slote said, “Is your father a clergyman?”
“His father’s a naval officer,” said Jastrow.
“Really? What branch?”
Byron said, “Well, right now he’s in War Plans.”
“My goodness! War Plans?” Dr. Jastrow pretended a comic flutter. “I didn’t know that. Is it as ominous as it sounds?”
“Sir, every country draws up theoretical war plans in peacetime.”
“Does your father think a war is imminent?”
“I got my last letter from him in November. He said nothing about a war.”
The other three exchanged odd glances. Slote said, “Would he, in casual correspondence?”
“He might have asked me to come home. He didn’t.”
“Interesting,” said Dr. Jastrow, with a little complacent grin at Slote, rubbing his tiny hands.
“As a matter of fact, I think there’s going to be a war,” Byron said. This caused a silence of a second or two, and more glances.
Jastrow said, “Really? Why?”
“Well, I just toured Germany. You see nothing but uniforms, parades, drills, brass bands. Anywhere you drive, you end up passing army trucks full of troops, and railroad cars loaded with artillery and tanks. Trains sometimes a couple of miles long.”
“But, Byron, it was with just such displays that Hitler won Austria and the Sudetenland,” said Jastrow, “and he never fired a shot.”
Natalie said to Byron, “Leslie thinks my uncle should go home. We’ve had a running argument for three days.”
“I see.”
Jastrow was peeling a pear with elderly deliberate gestures, using an ivory-handled knife. “Yes, Byron, I’m being mulish.” The use of the word was accidental, for he grinned and added, “Being a hybrid of sorts myself, I guess. This is a comfortable house, it’s the only home I have now, and my work is going well. Moving would cost me half a year. If I tried to sell the house, I couldn’t find an Italian to offer me five cents on the dollar. They’ve been dealing for many centuries with foreigners who’ve had to cut and run. They’d skin me alive. I was aware of all this when I bought the villa. I expect to end my days here.”
“Not this fall at the hands of the Nazis, I trust,” Slote said.
“Oh, hell, Slote,” Natalie broke in, slicing a flat hand downward through the air. “Since when does the Foreign Service have such a distinguished record for foresight? Since Munich? Since Austria? Since the Rhineland? Weren’t you surprised every time?”
Byron listened with interest to this exchange. The others seemed to have forgotten he was at the table.
“Hitler has been making irrational moves with catastrophic possibilities,” Slote retorted. “Anybody can pull a gun in the street and shoot four people down before the cops come and stop him. Until now that’s been Hitler’s so-called foreign policy brilliance in a nutshell. The surprise of an outlaw running wild. That game’s played out. The others are aroused now. They’ll stop him over Poland.”
Jastrow ate a piece of pear, and began to talk in a rhythmic, mellifluous way, something between meditating aloud and lecturing in a classroom. “Leslie, if Hitler were the Kaiser, or a man like Charles the Twelfth, I admit I’d be worried. But he’s far more competent than you think. Fortunately the old ruling class is destroyed. They unleashed the World War with their dry-rotted incompetence, those preening, posturing, sleek royalties and politicians of 1914, those bemedalled womanizers and sodomites out of Proust. They never dreamed that the old manners, the old paperwork, the old protocol, were done for, and that industrialized warfare would shatter the old system like a boot kicked through a dollhouse. So they went to the trash heap, and new leadership came up out of the sewers, where realism runs and change often starts. The early Christians haunted the sewers and catacombs of Rome, you know,” Jastrow said to Byron Henry, clearly relishing a fresh audience.
“Yes, sir, I learned about that.”
“Of course you did. Well, Hitler’s a vagabond, Mussolini’s a vagabond, and Stalin’s a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize—the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Aaron—”
“Just a moment, now! Lenin was all prudence and caution in foreign affairs, and that is my whole point. Glory, and honor, and all those tinselly illusions of the old system that led to wars, were to Lenin the merest eyewash. So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn’t get away with it. The outlaw running wild with a gun is the exact effect he wishes to create. I’m surprised that you’re taken in. He is really a very, very prudent man. If he can make it in Poland without war, he’ll do it. Otherwise he’ll not move. Not now. Perhaps in ten years, when he’s built Germany up enough. I shall be very content to live another ten years.”
Slote pulled at his moustache with lean nervous fingers. “You really lose me, Aaron. Can you be serious? Hitler a Leninist! That’s a coffeehouse paradox, and you know it. The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s f
rozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism. Don’t you know that? The 1934 purge was nothing but a showdown between the socialist element of the Nazi Party, and the army generals and rich conservatives. Hitler shot his old Party friends like partridges. That you rely on this man’s prudence for your safety, and for Natalie’s, strikes me as grotesque.”
“Does it?” Jastrow glanced at his watch and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m impressed with Hitler’s ability to use socialist prattle when necessary, and then discard it. He uses doctrines as he uses money, to get things done. They’re expendable. He uses racism because that’s the pure distillate of German romantic egotism, just as Lenin used utopian Marxism because it appealed to Russia’s messianic streak. Hitler means to hammer out a united Europe. If a nonsense jumble of racist bunkum, socialist promises, brass bands, parades, uniforms, and weepy songs is what welds Germans into a blunt instrument, he gives them that. The Germans are stolid, clever, brutal, and docile, and they will vigorously execute any command barked at them with a loud enough voice. He understands them, and he may just succeed. A unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It must all be thrown out. Somebody has to be ruthless enough to do it, since the peoples with their ancient hatreds will never do it themselves. It’s only Napoleon’s original vision, but he was a century ahead of his time. The old crowd was still strong enough to catch him and put him in a cage to die. But there’s nobody to cage Hitler.”
Byron blurted, “Dr. Jastrow, when I was in Germany I saw the signs on park benches and in trolley cars about the Jews. I saw burnt-out synagogues.”
“Yes?”
They all looked at him. He went on, “I’m surprised you talk as calmly about Hitler as you do. Being Jewish, I mean.”
Dr. Jastrow smiled a slow, acid smile, showing little yellowish teeth with one gold crown, He stroked his beard and spoke deliberately, the classroom note strong. “Well! Your surprise doesn’t surprise me. Young people—young Americans especially—aren’t aware that the tolerance for Jews in Europe is only fifty to a hundred years old and that it’s never gone deep. It didn’t touch Poland, where I was born. Even in the West—what about the Dreyfus case? No, no. In that respect Hitler represents only a return to normalcy for Europe, after the brief glow of liberalism. The hostility simply moved from the Church to the anti-Semitic parties, because the French Revolution changed Europe from a religious to a political continent. If Hitler does win out, the Jews will fall back to the second-class status they always had under the kings and the popes. Well, we survived seventeen centuries of that. We have a lot of wisdom and doctrine for coping with it.”
Slote shook his head. “You love to spin such talk, I know, but I wish you would do it on the next boat home.”
“But I’m quite serious, Leslie,” Jastrow said with a faintly puckish smile. “You rang wild alarms when Mussolini passed the anti-Jewish laws. They proved a joke.”
“They’re on the books, if the Germans ever press him to use them.”
“The Italians loathe and fear the Germans to a man. Even if by some mischance there is a war, Italy won’t fight. Siena may well be as safe a place as any.”
“I doubt that Natalie’s parents think so.”
“She can go home tomorrow. Perhaps she finds Siena slightly more attractive than Miami Beach.”
“I’m thinking of going,” the girl said. “But not because I’m afraid of war or of Hitler. There are things that bother me more.”
“I daresay,” Jastrow said.
Slote’s face turned astonishingly red. His pipe lay smoking on an ashtray, and he was playing with a yellow pencil he had taken from a pocket, turning it in one fist. The pencil stopped turning.
Jastrow stood. “Byron, come along.”
They left the girl and the scarlet-faced man at the table, glowering at each other.
Books filled the shelves of a small wood-panelled library, and stood in piles on the desk and on the floor. Over a white marble fireplace a stiff Sienese madonna and child hung, blue and pink on gold; a tiny painting in a large ornate gilded frame. “Berenson says it’s a Duccio,” Jastrow observed, with a little wave at the painting, “and that’s good enough for me. It’s not authenticated. Now then. You sit there, in the light, so that I can see you. Just put those magazines on the floor. Good. Is that a comfortable chair? Fine.” He sighed and laid a thumb against his lower lip. “Now, Byron, why didn’t you go to the Naval Academy? Aren’t you proud of your father?”
Byron sat up in his chair. “I think my father may be Chief of Naval Operations one day.”
“Isn’t he worth emulating?”
“My brother Warren’s doing that. I’m just not interested.”
“Dr. Milano wrote that you took a naval reserve course and obtained a commission.”
“It made my father feel good.”
“And you’ve had no second thoughts about the Navy? It’s not too late yet.”
Byron shook his head, smiling. Jastrow lit a cigarette, studying Byron’s face. The young man said, “Do you really like living in Italy, sir?”
“Well, I was ordered to a warm climate. I did first visit Florida, Arizona, southern California, and the French Riviera.” The professor spoke these place-names with an irony that wrote them off, one by one, as ridiculous or disagreeable. “Italy is beautiful, quiet, and cheap.”
“You don’t mind making your home in a Fascist country?”
Jastrow’s smile was indulgent. “There are good and bad things in all political systems.”
“How did you ever come to write A Jew’s Jesus, sir? Did you write it here?”
“Oh, no, but it got me here.” Jastrow spoke somewhat smugly. “I was using the Bible in a course on ancient history, you see. And as a boy in Poland I’d been a Talmud scholar, so in teaching the New Testament I tended to stress the rabbinic sources that Jesus and Paul used. This novelty seemed to fascinate Yale juniors. I cobbled up a book, with the working title Talmudic Themes in Early Christianity, and then at the last minute I thought of A Jew’s Jesus. The Book-of-the-Month Club selected it.” Jastrow made a soft gesture with both hands all around the room, smiling. “And here I am. The club payment bought this place. Now then, Byron, what are your plans? Are you going to return to the United States?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t be more up in the air.”
“Do you want a job?”
Byron was taken aback. “Well, I guess maybe I do, sir.”
Jastrow ambled to his desk and searched through a pile of books, taking off his glasses and holding the titles very close to his face. “I had a fine researcher, a boy from Yale, but his parents called him home, afraid of a war—ah, here we are. Can I interest you, for twenty dollars a week, in the Emperor Constantine? This is a good general biography to start with.”
“Sir, I’ve flunked more history courses—”
“I see. You don’t want the job.”
The young man took the thick book and turned it dubiously in his hands. “No. I’ll try it. Thank you.”
“Oh, you will, will you? When you say you have no aptitude? Why?”
“Well, for the money, and to be around you.” This was true enough, though it omitted a third good reason: Natalie Jastrow.
Jastrow looked stern, and then burst out laughing. “We’ll give it a try.”
The letter his parents received from him some time later about the girl—which elicited Victor Henry’s strong answer—was unintentionally misleading. There was a love affair going on, but Natalie’s lover was Leslie Slote. His letters came two or three times a week: long fat white Foreign Service envelopes, addressed in an elongated
stiff hand, in brown ink, with stamps stuck over the government frank. Byron hated the sight of them.
He was spending hours every day with her in the huge second-floor room that was Jastrow’s main library. Her desk was there. She answered letters, typed manuscripts, and with the Italian woman managed the household. Byron worked at the long library table, reading up on Constantine, checking facts, and drawing maps of the emperor’s military campaigns. Whenever he raised his eyes he saw the smooth face bent over the desk, the shapely bones highlighted by sunshine, or on dark days by a lamp. There was also the ever-present view of her long pretty legs in a sheen of silk. Natalie dressed in dun wool, and was all business with him; she used almost no paint once Slote left, combed her hair back in a heavy bun, and talked to Byron with offhand dryness. Still, his infatuation took quick root and grew rankly.
She was the first American girl he had spoken to in months; and they were thrown together for many hours every day, just the two of them in the book-lined room. This was reason enough for him to feel attracted to her. But she impressed him, too. Natalie Jastrow talked to her famous uncle as to a mental equal. Her range of knowledge and ideas humiliated Byron, and yet there was nothing bookish about her. Girls in his experience were lightweights, fools for a smile and a bit of flattery. They had doted on him at college, and in Florence too. Byron was something of an Adonis, indolent and not hotly interested; and unlike Warren, he had absorbed some of his father’s straitlaced ideas. He thought Natalie was a dark jewel of intellect and loveliness, blazing away all unnoticed here in the Italian back hills. As for her indifference to him, it seemed in order. He had no thought of trying to break it down.
He did things he had never done before. He stole a little pale blue handkerchief of hers and sat at night in his hotel room in town, sniffing it. Once he ate half a cake she had left on her desk, because it bore the mark of her teeth. When she missed the cake, he calmly lied about it. Altogether he was in a bad way. Natalie Jastrow seemed to sense nothing of this. Byron had a hard shell of inscrutability, grown in boyhood to protect his laziness and school failures from his exacting father.