by Herman Wouk
Rhoda was not blind to the Nazi abuses. After her first walk in the Tiergarten, she refused to go back. It was far more clean, pretty, and charming than any American public park, she admitted, but the signs on the benches, JUDEN VERBOTEN, were nauseating. Seeing similar signs in restaurant windows, she would recoil and demand to go elsewhere. When Pug told her of his interview with Rosenthal, she had a deep attack of the blues: she wanted to forgo the house and even talked of getting out of Germany. “Why, imagine! Renting out that beautiful house for a song, just to keep it from being sold over his head—to some fat Nazi, no doubt, lying in wait to pick it off cheap. How horrible.” But she agreed that they had better take it. They had to live somewhere, and the house was divine.
Day by day, she reacted less to such things, seeing how commonplace they were in Berlin, and how much taken for granted. When Sally Forrest, who loathed the Nazis, took her to lunch at a restaurant where a window placard announced that Jews were not served, it seemed silly to protest. Soon she ate in such places without a second thought. In time, the Tiergarten became her favorite place for a Sunday stroll. But she insisted that anti-Semitism was a blot on an otherwise exciting, lovely land. She would say so to prominent Nazis. Some stiffened, others tolerantly smirked. A few hinted that the problem would straighten out in time.
“I’m an American to the bone, going back six generations,” she would say, “and I’ll never see eye to eye with you on this business of the Jews. It’s absolutely awful.”
Most Germans seemed resigned to this independent, outspoken manner of American women and the way their husbands tolerated it; they regarded it as a national oddity.
Victor Henry stayed off the Jewish topic. Nazi Germany was a big, not readily digestible lump of new life. Most foreigners were strongly foi or against the Nazis. The correspondents, as Kip Tollever had observed, hated them to a man. Within the embassy views varied. According to some, Hitler was the greatest menace to America since 1776. He would stop at nothing less than world rule, and the day he was strong enough, he would attack the United States. Others saw him as a benefactor, the only bulwark in Europe against Communism. The democracies had shown themselves impotent against the spread of Bolshevist parties, they said. Hitler fought totalitarian fire with hotter and stronger fire.
These judgments, either way, stood on slender bases of knowledge. Pressing his new acquaintances for facts, Victor Henry got vehement opinions and gestures. Statistics abounded in sheaves of analyses and reports, but too much of this stuff also came down to guesses, propaganda, and questionable paid intelligence. He tried to study German history late at night and found it a muddy tangle going back more than a thousand years. In it he could find no pattern and no guide at all to the problems of 1939. Just to figure out where the Nazis had come from, and what the secret was of Hitler’s hold on the Germans, seemed a task beyond him and beyond anybody he talked to; even the outlandish question of German anti-Semitism had a dozen different explanations, depending on which of any twelve Foreign Service men you asked. Commander Henry decided that he would grope uselessly if he tried to fathom these major matters in a hurry. Military capacity was something he knew about; it was a narrow but decisive aspect of Hitler’s Third Empire. Was Nazi Germany as strong as the ever-marching columns in the streets, and the throngs of uniforms in cafés, suggested? Was it all a show, no more substantial than the transparent red cheesecloth of the towering swastika banners? Deciding to take nothing for granted and to marshal facts for himself, Victor Henry dug into the job of penetrating this one puzzle.
Meanwhile Rhoda adapted merrily to diplomatic life. As she got used to her staff and to Berlin customs, her dinner parties increased in size. She invited the Grobkes to a big one that included the chargé d’affaires, a French film actress, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and a dour, stout German general named Armin von Roon, with a peculiarly hooked nose and an exceedingly stiff carriage. Rhoda knew none of these people well. General von Roon, for instance, she had met at Colonel Forrest’s house; and because someone had told her that he stood high in the Wehrmacht and was considered brilliant, she had made up to him. She had a gift for charming in a momentary encounter. She always looked elegant, she could be amusing or sexy without forcing either note, and she made one feel that it would be pleasant to know her better. People tended to accept her invitations.
The company was above the level of Grobke and his wife. They were dazzled and flattered, and the presence of Roon all but froze them with awe. Grobke whispered to Victor Henry at one point that Roon was the real brain in Supreme Headquarters. So Pug tried to talk to Roon about the war, and found that he spoke astonishingly good English. But he would utter only frosty generalities, which made the attaché think the better of him, though it yielded nothing to report.
Before the evening was out Grobke, full of wine and brandy, took Victor Henry aside and told him that the captain of the Swinemünde navy yard was making stupid difficulties, but that he was going to push the visit through, “and I’ll get your English friend in too, God damn it. I said I would and I will. These shore-based bastards just live to create trouble.”
The Henrys received one cheerless letter from Madeline, written when she arrived in Newport for the summer. Warren, as usual, did not write at all. Early in July the letter Byron had written his father at last caught up with him:
Dear Dad:
I received your letter and it threw me. I guess I gave you the wrong impression about this girl Natalie Jastrow. It’s fun to work with her, but she’s older than I am, and she was a junior Phi Bete at Radcliffe. Her best boyfriend is a Rhodes Scholar. I’m not in that league. However, I appreciate your good advice. She is really excellent company, and talking to her improves my mind. That should please you.
Dr. Jastrow has me researching the Emperor Constantine’s military campaigns. I took the job for the money, but I’m enjoying it. That whole period, when the world balance tips from paganism to Christianity, is really worth knowing, Dad. It has some parallels to our own day. I think you’ll like Dr. Jastrow’s new book. He’s just a scholar and wouldn’t know a torpedo boat from a medium tank, yet he has a way of grasping an ancient campaign and describing it so anybody can understand it and sort of picture what those times were like.
Siena’s going to be overrun with tourists for the Palio, a goofy horse race they put on every year. The nags run around the town square, and they say all hell usually breaks loose. Warren will make a great flier. Well, I guess that’s about it. Love to all.
Byron
5
SINCE the fourteenth century—so Byron had learned—nothing much had happened in Siena besides the Palios. A rich city-state of the Middle Ages, the military rival of Florence, Siena in 1348 had been isolated by the Black Death, and frozen in its present form as by a spell. A few art lovers now drifted here to admire the fourteenth-century paintings and architecture. The world at large flocked to Siena twice a year to watch the mad horse races, and otherwise let the bypassed town, a living scene out of an old tapestry, molder in the Tuscan sunshine.
In nine years of living just outside Siena, Aaron Jastrow had never attended a Palio. When Byron asked why, Jastrow held forth on the cruel public games of Roman times, the forerunners of all these burlesque races of the Middle Ages. The Palio had happened to survive in mountain-locked Siena, he said, like a dinosaur in the Lost World. “Some medieval towns raced donkeys or buffaloes,” he said. “In papal Rome, they raced Jews. I’m not exactly afraid I’ll be pressed into service if a horse should break its leg. I’m just not very interested.” Moreover, his friend the archbishop had told him long ago that elderly people avoided the Palio, because of the risk of being jostled or trampled.
But now there was the article to write. Jastrow obtained tickets for both runnings, and sent Byron and Natalie to do research in the town while he read books on the subject.
They first learned that the race was a contest among Siena’s neighborhoods or parishes.
Each district, called a contrada, comprised a few square blocks of old houses. All of Siena contained but two and a half square miles and some thirty thousand people. But these little wards—there were seventeen, and ten competed each year—took themselves, their boundaries, their loyalties, their colors, their emblems, with inconceivable seriousness. They bore curious names like Oca, Bruco, Torre, Tartuca, Nicchio (Goose, Caterpillar, Tower, Tortoise, Seashell). Each ward had its flag, its anthems, its separate churches, and even a sort of capital hall.
Byron and Natalie spent days walking through the hilly angular streets. When an occasional old omnibus snorted by, they had to flatten against the high red-brown walls for their lives; there were no sidewalks, and the somnolent, deserted streets were hardly wider than the bus. Maps in hand, the pair visited the tiny districts one by one, trying to pin down the background of the Palio. They found out about alliances and hatreds going back hundreds of years. Panther was friendly to Giraffe, Tortoise loathed Snail, and so forth, in a tangle of emotions, very real and current.
They came to realize too that the famous race itself was just a crooked farce, and that everybody knew it. The contrade owned no horses. A few days before each race, animals from the nearby countryside were brought into town, and the competing districts drew lots for them. The same stolid durable nags came back year after year, shuffling from one neighborhood to another by the luck of the draw.
What then made a race of it? Bribing the jockeys, doping the animals, conspiring to block the best horses or injure their riders: only such devices turned the Palio into a murky contest of a sort. The largest, richest neighborhoods therefore tended to win; but the outcome was unpredictable, because a poor, small district might put on a desperate surge. It might squander funds in bribes, pledge future alliances, swear to future treacheries, just to win a banner to bear off to its hall. For that was what the “Palio” itself was: a banner painted with a picture of the Virgin. Like all medieval races, this one was run on sacred days; it was a manifestazione in honor of the Virgin. Hence her portrait graced the prize, and faded Palios by the dozens hung in the contrada halls.
After a while, even Jastrow became interested too, in an ironic way. The crookedness, he said, was obviously the soul of the thing; old European skulduggery, bribes and counterbribes, doublecross and triplecross, sudden reversals of old alliances, secret temporary patching up of ancient enmities, convoluted chicanery in the dark—all leading at last to the horse race, when all the shadowy corruption was put to explosive proof in red sunset light.
“Why, this article will write itself,” he said cheerfully one day at lunch. “These Sienese have evolved willy-nilly a grotesque little parody of European nationalism. The archbishop told me that a woman from the Panther neighborhood who marries a Caterpillar or a Tower man will go back to have her babies in a house on a Panther street to make sure they’ll be Panthers. Patriotism! And of course, the insane explosion every summer is the key. All this obsolete mummery—Snails, Giraffes, what have you—would have died out centuries ago, except for the lovely colorful outbursts of excitement, treachery, and violence in the races. The Palio is war.”
“You ought to go over to town, sir,” Byron said. “They’re laying the track. Hundreds of truckloads of this golden-red earth, all around the Piazza del Campo.”
“Yes,” Natalie said, “the way they’re decorating up the streets is quite amazing. And wherever you look the flag-wavers are practicing—”
“I’m taking off two whole workdays for the races themselves. That’s plenty,” Jastrow said severely.
You know what?” Byron said. “This whole thing is utterly idiotic.”
Natalie looked at him with startled, excited eyes, touching a handkerchief to her sweaty forehead. It was the day of the first Palio, and they stood on the balcony of the archbishop’s palace, watching the parade. The great façade of the cathedral gave a bit of shade at one end of the balcony, where Jastrow in his big yellow Panama hat and white suit stood talking with the archbishop. Byron and Natalie were crowded among privileged onlookers at the other end, in the hot sun. Even in her sleeveless light pink linen dress, the girl was perspiring, and a seersucker jacket and silk tie were making Byron acutely uncomfortable.
Below, the Caterpillar marchers in green and yellow costumes—puffed sleeves and trunks, colored hose, feathered hats—were leaving the thronged cathedral square, waving great banners to cheers and applause from the crowd; and the red-and-black Owl company was coming in, repeating the same flag stunts: intertwining whorls, two flags flung pole and all in the air and crisscrossing, flag-wavers leaping over each other’s poles while keeping their banners in fluid motion.
“Idiotic?” Natalie said. “I was just deciding it’s rather magical.”
“What is? They do the same things over and over. We’ve been here for hours. There’s still the Porcupine, the Eagle, the Giraffe, and the Forest to come and show off with their flags. I’m roasting.”
“Ah, Byron, it’s the liquid flow of color, don’t you see, and the faces of these young men. So help me, these people look more natural in medieval togs than in their workaday clothes. Don’t they? Look at those long straight noses, those deep-set sad big eyes! Maybe they’re really a remnant of the Etruscans, as they claim.”
“Six months of work,” Byron said. “Special buildings and churches for Unicorns, Porcupines, and Giraffes. Thousands of costumes, a whole week of nothing but ceremonies, general marching hither and yon, trumpeting and drumming and trial runs, and all for one crooked race of decrepit nags. In honor of the Virgin, no less.”
“Oh, beautiful,” Natalie exclaimed, as two Owl flags flew high in the air in crossing arcs, and the wavers caught them and whirled red-and-black arabesques to the applause of the crowd.
Byron went on, mopping his face, “I was in the Goose church today. They brought the horse right inside, up to the very altar to be blessed. I didn’t believe the books, but I saw it happen. The priest laid a crucifix on its nose. The horse had more sense than the people. He didn’t misbehave, but I guess that finished the Palio for me.”
Natalie glanced at him, amused. “Poor Briny. Italian Christianity really troubles your soul, doesn’t it? Leslie was right, you’re simply a Protestant.”
“Does a horse belong in a church?” Byron said.
The sun was low when the parade ended. In the short walk from the cathedral to the Piazza del Campo, Jastrow grew nervous. A thick crowd jostled down the narrow street, all in good humor, but shouting, gesturing, and hurrying between the high red-brown stone walls of the old palazzos. More than once the little professor stumbled and tottered. He clung to Byron’s arm. “Do you mind? I’ve always had a slight fear of crowds. People mean no harm, but somehow they don’t notice me.” They halted in a crush at a low arch and slowly squeezed through.
“Good gracious,” Jastrow said, as they emerged on the earth of the race track. “The piazza’s transformed!”
“They’ve been working on it for weeks,” Byron said. “I told you.”
Siena’s main piazza was one of the sights of Italy. The forgotten town planners of the Middle Ages had designed a memorably beautiful open space, hemmed in by a semicircular sweep of reddish palazzos and the imposing, almost straight façade of the fourteenth-century town hall; all overarched by the blue sky of Tuscany, and pierced heavenward by the red stone bell tower of the town hall, more than three hundred fifty feet high. All year round the vast shell-shaped space was empty except for market stalls and scattered foot traffic; and the ancient buildings that ringed it seemed abandoned or asleep.
Today, in the golden light of a late afternoon sun, it was a sea of people, surging and roaring inside a ring of wooden barriers. Between these barriers and the palazzo walls lay a track of earth, and against the walls were steep banks of temporary benches. Faces crowded at every window of every building around the piazza; flags and rich hangings decorated the palazzos. The benches were jammed; all the roofs were jammed; the great
central space looked full, and yet from half a dozen narrow streets more people were streaming across the track and jamming themselves in. The parade was now going around the track of earth, and all the contrade at once were doing the flag whorls, the flings, the arabesques to continuous plaudits of the throng and the cacophonous blare of many brass bands.
Byron led the way to their seats, still holding Jastrow’s thin arm. “Well, hasn’t the archbishop done us proud!” said the professor, as they settled on a narrow, splintery plank, directly below the judges’ stand. “One couldn’t have a better view of the thing.” He laughed without reason, obviously feeling better out of the press of bodies.
“See the mattresses?” said Natalie gaily. “There they are, down at the corners.”
“Oh, yes. My lord, what an extraordinary business.”
The noise of the crowd rose into a general cheer. A wooden cart, drawn by four white Tuscan oxen with giant curved horns, was entering the track, surrounded by marchers in rich costume. On a tall pole in the cart swayed the Palio. “Why, it’s an Assumption,” said Jastrow, peering through small binoculars at the narrow painted cloth. “Naïve, but not bad at all.”
Around the piazza the cart slowly rolled, with helmeted policemen behind it driving the crowd from the track, while sweepers cleared up papers and trash. By now the paved square was one dense mass of white shirts, colored dresses, and dark heads, bringing out the half-moon shape of the track, and its danger. The red palazzos sloped downward to the town hall, where a straight street sliced off the broad curve. Heavy mattresses padded the outer barriers at these sharply cut corners. Even at the trial runs, Byron and Natalie had seen horses thud against the mattresses and knock their jockeys senseless.