by Herman Wouk
The Italians had already cancelled the exit visas of Americans. The chargé had told Jastrow that this was just a precautionary move, and that they should still plan to leave on the fifteenth if meantime war was not declared. For days Jastrow had slept and eaten little. Now Hitler’s speech, as he listened, seemed to be clanging shut an iron door.
“Well?” Natalie said, carrying in the blanket-wrapped squalling baby. “Is there any hope?”
“He hasn’t declared war yet. Not in so many words.”
In an absent practiced way, without much effort at modesty, she opened her sweater, suit jacket, and blouse, flashed a white breast, and drew the brown sweater over the baby. “Why is it so much colder in this room? It’s icy, and the more—”
Jastrow put a finger to his lips. Hitler was whipping himself up to a crescendo. His audience, hushed for a long time, broke out in applause, cheers, and roars of “Sieg Heil!”
“Now what was that, Aaron?”
Jastrow raised his voice over the raucous noises of the crowd. “I’m afraid that was it. He said he’s called in the United States diplomats and given them their papers. That started the cheering.”
“Well, all I can say is, I couldn’t be less surprised.” Natalie stroked the baby’s cheek with a finger, and dolefully smiled as it quieted and began sucking. “You’re just hungry, monkey, aren’t you?”
Her uncle said, “Mussolini still has to talk. We’ll know in another hour or so.”
“Oh, Aaron, what choice has he?”
He shut off the radio. “Well, that’s that. I believe I’ll have a glass of sherry. You, too?”
“No, no. I’d better keep my wits about me today, what’s left of them.”
Jastrow poured and gulped a glassful, then took another, and shrank in his armchair, sipping it, looking vacantly around at the high long frigid room piled with suitcases and wooden boxes. The hotel was silent and the street outside was silent.
“Don’t despair, Natalie. In 1939 Il Duce did manage to squirm out of it, you know. He’s no use to Hitler militarily. The Italians are sick and sour and beaten. If he declares war against the United States, he might be assassinated, and Hitler surely doesn’t want that. Besides, he’s wily. He may well find some weaseling formula, and we may yet be on that plane on the fifteenth.”
“Oh, Aaron, quit it, for God’s sake. He’ll declare war.”
Jastrow sighed heavily. “I suppose so. Natalie, I’m sorry, deeply and tragically sorry.”
She held up a hand, palm out. “No, no. Don’t. What’s the use?”
“Let me have my say. I simply can’t bear the way I’ve involved you and your baby. I’ve never—”
“Aaron, I did it myself. Don’t rake it over now. Don’t. I can’t stand that.”
A long silence, except for the baby making loud sucking noises. Jastrow sipped the sherry, glancing at his niece with a hangdog expression. “I might telephone the embassy, my dear, and ask if there are any plans afoot for the diplomatic train.”
“That’s a good idea, if you can get through. Otherwise we’d better go there.”
“I’m planning to,” Jastrow said, “in any case.” He made the call, but the embassy lines were busy. Pouring more sherry, he spoke slowly, coughing now and then. “One thing wrong with being a historian is the way it distorts one’s view of the present. I seem to see current events through the wrong end of a telescope. The figures look small and comical. The happenings seem so trivial, so repetitious, so banal! I can read the past fairly well, I think, and I also have some clarity about the future. Only in the present am I so dense. Hitler and Mussolini don’t have the resources to last, my dear. This gaudy shabby militaristic madhouse in central Europe will fall. Russia and America are awesome, and between them they will crush Nazism. The only question is how soon. Well, I’d better dress.”
“Yes, do that, Aaron.”
“I’ll just finish my wine first.”
Natalie impatiently arose and took the baby into the bedroom to avoid a row with her uncle. She had no store of kindness left for this garrulous, vain, cranky old man, whose Olympian irony and willfully blinkered optimism had mired her and her baby in this peril; though in the end—she always came back to this—she herself was most responsible.
Natalie Henry had thought and thought about her predicament until she could no longer bear the self-probing. Where had she committed the fatal stupidity? In coming back? In marrying Byron? In not taking the German plane out of Zurich? In not following Herb Rose to the Palestine ship? No, something deep was wrong with her; she was in some ultimate sense, for all her apparent cleverness, a terrible fool. She was nothing and nobody; she had no real identity; all her life she had been floating like dandelion fuzz on the wind. She was “Jewish,” but the label meant nothing to her beyond the trouble it caused. She had had her first love affair with an intellectual heathen Gentile. She had married a Christian without giving the clash of backgrounds much thought; his youth and lack of learning had bothered her more. What a queer, random, disjointed chain of happenings had created this sleepy blue-eyed little living thing at her breast!
In the past weeks, Natalie had started dreaming at night that none of it had happened. In these dreams time reeled back, sometimes to Paris, sometimes to college, most often to her childhood on Long Island. Relief and joy would fill her in her sleep at finding that she was out of the nightmare; cold sinking sadness would follow when she woke to discover that the wrong side of the dream-line was the real side. But at least on this side the baby dwelled.
The baby was becoming her anchor to life. At the moment the most real thing on earth was the warm little mouth at her chest: alive, sweet, and sublimely good. Beyond it—in the hotel suite, in Rome, in Europe—all was squalor, danger, uncertainty, and darkening horizons. The diplomatic train was the very last chance. Natalie tucked the infant away when he dropped asleep, and dressed to go to the embassy.
“Ah, my dear, you look very well.” In the sitting room Aaron now reclined rather grandly on a couch, in the handsome blue cape that the Searles had given him for his sixty-second birthday, his best dark suit, and a large bow tie. He was still drinking sherry.
“Balderdash. If I ever get home safe, one of my first orders of business will be to burn this damned dress, and I’ll never wear brown again.”
Waving his half-full glass at her with stiff jauntiness, Aaron laughed merrily. “It’s grand that you’ve kept your sense of humor,” he said, although Natalie had been quite serious. “Sit down, my dear. Don’t pace.”
“Aren’t we going to the embassy?” She perched on the arm of a couch.
“Tell me, Natalie, did you ever meet Father Enrico Spanelli?”
“That Vatican librarian? No.”
He gave her the squinting teasing smile that appeared in late evenings when he had taken too much brandy. “But I thought we all had dinner one evening together.”
“We were supposed to. Louis got sick.”
“Oh yes. I remember now. Well, Enrico is coming in a little while to drive us to the Piazza Venezia. He knows all the newspapermen, and we’ll hear and see Mussolini from the press section.”
“What! Good Lord, I don’t want to go there with the baby in that Fascist mob! What about—”
Jastrow held up a cautionary hand and began scrawling on a pad, talking at the same time. “Well, my dear, it’s visible history. Since we’re in a tight spot, we may as well have the good of it.”
The sheet he passed to her read: If it’s war he’ll take us straight to the embassy. That’s the idea. We’ll be out of the hotel, where we might be picked up.
She wrote underneath, Why do you trust him? They did not know for certain that microphones had been planted in their suite, but they sometimes wrote notes as a precaution.
Jastrow blinked at her, took off his glasses, and polished them with a handkerchief. This was his unconscious signal, long familiar to Natalie, of a harangue. Softly he said, “Natalie, do you know that I am
a Catholic?”
“What! What do you mean?”
“Ah, then you don’t know. I thought perhaps you were being tactful, all these years. Well, it’s quite true.”
Aaron often made odd remarks over brandy or wine, but he had never said anything this strange. Puzzled and disconcerted, Natalie shrugged, “What am I supposed to say? Are you serious?”
“Oh, very. It’s the family skeleton, my dear. I’m a bit surprised that they never told you. I converted when I was twenty-three.” He gave her a red-eyed, twisted, sheepish grin, scratching his beard. “It never took. I fear I’m the wrong blood type for that or any religion. At the time the act was sincere.”
Aaron now told her about a Radcliffe girl whom he had tutored in history and aesthetics, a girl of a wealthy Catholic family. After a stormy year and a half the love affair had collapsed. He had left Cambridge and finished up his doctorate at Yale, to put behind him the girl and his memories.
His conversion had been a very private matter. He had been discreet and stealthy about taking instruction, for many Jewish friends in Boston had been kind to him and he did not want to upset or argue with them. By the time he departed from Harvard, he had decided that the conversion was a mistake, having painfully worked his way to the skeptical naturalism that was his settled view. Thereafter, whenever the question of his religion came up, he had mentioned his self-evident Jewish origin and said no more. He had done nothing further about the Catholic episode; he had simply let it lapse from his life.
But he had made one bad mistake, very early in the affair. He had discussed it with his family. “That I’ve always regretted,” he said gloomily. “It probably shortened my father’s life—my mother by then was dead—and your parents certainly never got over the shock. We were estranged for good, though I once told your father that that phase was over, that I considered myself a non-practicing Jew and nothing else. It didn’t help. They dropped me.
“When the Book-of-the-Month Club chose A Jew’s Jesus, Louis did write me a stiff little letter. His rabbi wanted me to come and lecture at his temple. He phrased it so that I could hardly accept. I thought his letter was cruel. I replied very warmly, but I declined. That was that. I never saw either of them again. I’ve only discussed this with one other person beside yourself in more than thirty years, Natalie, and that other person is Enrico Spanelli.
“I told him in September, when I was turned back from Switzerland. I thought it might prove useful. He’s an excellent fellow and a fine classical scholar, though rather weak on early Byzantium. Well, he has been marvellously sympathetic. He never argued my religious position, but simply wrote to the United States for verification. He’s got the documents, and I have copies. So—we have friends in the Vatican, my dear. I hope we won’t need them, but it is a sort of insurance.”
Natalie, who could think only of the possible effect on her baby, was pleased and amazed. This was like finding a forgotten rusty key to a dungeon cell. Aaron’s youthful religious flip-flops were his own business; but the technicality might indeed bring help and refuge, or even escape in an emergency! This disclosure also explained, at long last, her parents’ peculiarly strained and glum attitude about Aaron. Deep down, she herself felt a small involuntary stirring of disdain for her uncle.
She said, “Why, Aaron, I’m gasping a bit, but I think it’s most amazingly clever of you to have stopped being a Jew more than forty years ago. What foresight!”
“Oh, I’m still a Jew. Don’t make that mistake. So was Paul after his conversion, you know. You’re not disgusted with me, then, as your parents were? How nice.”
A satirical smile wrinkled her mouth. “A Jew’s Jesus, indeed. You fraud.”
“He was a Jew’s Jesus.” Aaron Jastrow straightened up inside the heavy cape and raised a bearded proud chin. “I insist on that. The book is the fruit of a bitter wrestle with myself. I was frankly swept away by the whole opulent Christian structure of thought and art that I discovered in college, all built on what that Palestinian fellow called a murdered Jew. We Jews pretend that structure doesn’t exist, Natalie—that is, Jews like your parents and mine do—but that won’t wash, you know. It’s there. In the end I probed past the religious metaphors and came to grips with Jesus as he was, trying to grasp the historical reality. That was the essence of my wrestle for a year. I found an extraordinarily winning and magnetic personality, a talented and tragic poor relative of mine, who lived in Palestine in olden days. So the book really—”
The telephone rang. “Ah,” Jastrow said, pushing himself out of his chair, “that’s bound to be Enrico. Get the baby, dear.”
Natalie hesitated, then said, “All right. Let’s go.”
At the wheel of a rusty, faded little car outside the hotel, a man wearing a clerical hat, and an overcoat with a ratty fur collar, waved a smoking cigarette at them in a thick peasant hand. “Professore!” The librarian-priest had a face strangely like Mussolini’s—prominent brown eyes, big curved jaw, and wide fleshy mouth. But rimless glasses and a sweet placid expression under the flat black hat, as well as his indoor pallor, much reduced the ominous resemblance. “You look tired, Professore,” he said, after greeting Natalie in charming Roman Italian, and admiring the heavily wrapped, almost invisible baby. The car started with rheumatic wheezings.
“I’ve not slept well.”
The priest’s glance was mild and kind. “I understand. As you requested, I’ve made inquiries about your taking refuge in the Vatican. It’s not impossible, but the concordat pathetically limits our freedom of action. I would offer you one word of caution. Such exceptional expedients can have negative results. One calls attention to oneself. One becomes a special case.” He drove carefully down the almost deserted boulevard and turned into a street where people were crowding toward the Piazza Venezia, with placards swaying above their heads.
“The trouble is,” said Jastrow, “I already am one.”
The priest pursed his lips and tilted his head in a most Italian way. “True. Well, your cloudy nationality might be an advantage. If you are actually stateless, then clearly you are not an enemy alien.” Spanelli glanced around at Natalie with drooping eyes. “This is not true of your niece, naturally. One assumes your embassy will somehow provide for her—”
“Father, pardon me. Whoever gives me refuge must take her in too.”
The priest pursed his lips again and was silent. The crowd thickened as they neared the piazza: quiet sad-looking people in shabby winter clothes. The blackshirts carrying the placards were trying to hold up their chins and glare like Il Duce.
“These signs are viler than usual,” Jastrow said. Beside the car, a fat red-faced blackshirt marched with a crude cartoon of Mrs. Roosevelt sitting on a chamber pot, squawking obscenities about her husband. Ahead of the car, on another sign, a bag of money with a Roosevelt grin walked on crutches, smoking a cigarette in an uptilted holder.
“When the pot boils, the scum comes to the surface,” said the priest.
He slipped the car through narrow side streets, parked in a rubbish-filled archway, and guided them down an alley into the Piazza Venezia. The thronged square was surprisingly still. People stood around saying nothing, or chatting in low tones. The sky was gray, the wind strong and cold. Flag-bearing schoolchildren were huddled in front of the balcony in a docile mass, not laughing or playing pranks, just holding their flapping flags up and fidgeting.
The priest brought Jastrow and Natalie into a roped-off section near the balcony, where photographers clustered with reporters, including a few Americans, as well as the grinning happy Japanese correspondents Natalie had met at the party. Somebody produced a folding chair for her. She sat holding the sleeping baby tightly in her lap, now and then shuddering, though she wore a heavy sweater under her coat. The raw wind seemed to cut through to her skin.
They waited a long time before Mussolini suddenly stepped out on the balcony and raised a hand in salute. A crowd roar cascaded and reechoed in the square: “Duce! Duce!
Duce!” It was a strange effect, since all the people were looking up silently, with blank or hostile faces, at the tubby figure in the gold-eagled, tasselled black hat, and the black and gold jacket, a get-up more like an opera costume than a uniform. Under the balcony, a few blackshirts were diligently manufacturing the cheers, huddled around microphones. A tall man in the uniform of the German Foreign Service appeared next, with a Japanese in a cutaway coat and high hat. They flanked the dictator, who was even smaller than the Oriental; and Mussolini looked as though he were between guards come to arrest him. The blackshirts quit their noise and turned their oval, sallow faces up at the balcony; a pack of waiters and barbers, Natalie thought, in sloppy pseudomilitary masquerade.
The brief speech was belligerent, the tone was belligerent, the gestures were very familiar and very belligerent, but it all came out ridiculous. The sound did not fit the gestures. Mussolini flailed his fist when he dropped his voice, and shouted fiercely some innocuous prepositions and conjunctions, and at the most inappropriate points he grinned. The old puffy dictator, already defeated in Greece and shorn of much of his North African empire, seemed to be having a highly irrelevant good time, as he declared war on the United States of America. While the blackshirts at random moments cheered and shouted “Doo-chay!” the crowd began to leave. Mussolini bellowed his last sentences at thousands of departing backs—an incredible sight in this dictatorship—an old ham actor scorned by the audience: “Italians, once more arise and be worthy of this historic hour. We shall WIN!” And again he smiled.