An Infinity of Mirrors (16 page)

“They still talk about my grandfather's wedding here,” Gretel said, as they drove along the poplar-lined drive through broad meadows toward the two huge houses suspended in time on the side of a hill. “It began with a squadron of mounted postillions sounding the wedding march on hunting horns. Then came the hussars on matched silver horses—I don't think they were matched at all, but that's what happens when stories are retold. We do have signed books showing that ambassadors and special envoys from all the royal houses were here. I suppose the Kaiser came—he usually found a reason to be at our parties, but it's hardly likely that anyone would have the brass to ask him to sign a book.”

Paule was so filled with her new surroundings at Wusterwitz and seeing them through Paul-Alain's eyes that she settled peacefully into her new life. Veelee wrote passionate love letters, when he could get them out of Spain by fellow officers who would mail them from Germany. Within a few weeks she had letters postmarked Zwickau, Aurich, Bad Reichenhall and Nagold—which destroyed her conception that all officers came from East Prussia. “The smartest ones come from East Prussia,” Gretel said loyally. “They've been at it the longest. The stupidest come from Hanover. Have you ever known any French officers?”

“No, but once Papa played Maréchal Ney, so I know the dress uniforms.”

“I adore French officers. I had an affair with a perfect brigadier when we were posted in Paris in 1919—during the business of the Treaty.”

“Gretel!”

“Well, I've never known such a perfect lover. He made seduction so easy. I mean, what was the sense of coming to Paris at all if … Well, anyway, Hansel was up to his ears with von Seeckt's worries over the Treaty, and our whole staff was in such a flat that—”

“Who was he?”

“He was—” Gretel's jaw dropped. “His name was—” Her face turned bright red. “My God, Paule!”

“Gretel, darling, what is the matter?”

“He said—I mean, he made no effort to hide it, and he was in uniform whenever I came to his flat—he said he was Brigadier Paul Bernheim.”

“Papa!”

“Do you have a picture of your father?”

“Oh, yes! Oh, I am sure it was Papa. It must have been Papa!” She unsnapped the locket on the gold chain around her neck which held a picture of Bernheim and one of Veelee and handed it to Gretel. Her sister-in-law had only to glance at it. “It is him! Oh, Paule, he was the only man I have ever known beyond Hansel.”

“Goodness, he must have been dashing as a brigadier.”

“It had never occurred to me to connect you with him, because you had said that no one in your family was ever in the army.”

“Papa frequently did that sort of thing,” Paule said. “It was to inspire confidence. If you had been a banker's wife he would have posed as a banker. Why, a great love of his was a scientist, quite famous really, who dealt in the most abstruse sort of work. Papa pored over monographs and pamphlets on her subject, as though he were learning a starring role, and then led her into bed—like that!” She snapped her fingers proudly.

“But—how did you know all this?”

“His wives would tell me. They were often lonely, but it was impossible not to feel proud of Papa if you were in the family. And they would tell me stories of his courtship of them, and they would repeat the current gossip about him—which of course always came to them first.”

Gretel's cheeks were still pink. “I feel like a girl again just talking about him,” she said.

Paule nodded with pride. “The flat, I am sure, was on the Avenue Gabriel?”

“Yes, but he took me to a small hotel in Versailles first.” She sighed. “We tangoed for hours late at night—though heaven knows we did not rest much in between.”

Paule laughed delightedly and felt young again.

Berlin seemed to be a galaxy away. The months passed from the multicolored northern autumn to the stark black and white of winter. Paul-Alain grew taller and blond and sturdy; he was so much like his father that it astounded both Paule and Gretel. They walked a great deal. Gretel spoke the local dialect flawlessly, but to Paule it sounded like a Mandarin singing in Gaelic. They drank endless cups of coffee. When they went calling they were always invited to have coffee. The ritual was to refuse so that they could be asked again. When the offer was made a third time it had to be accepted, and the cup would be filled again and again until the drinker turned it upside down. Then the process began once more until the cup was turned over a second time and a spoon placed on top of it.

She spent as much time with Paul-Alain as he would allow. He had begun to discover that older boys were allowed to risk their necks jumping from the tops of barns or sliding down the branches of spruce trees higher than houses, so he had to be watched. He played with a huge set of toy soldiers which they had found in his great-grandfather's study and with which the Battle of Waterloo, in which four of his ancestors had participated, could be restaged in detail. Great-grandfather's room was Paul-Alain's favorite place when the weather went wrong. It was a museum of battle flags, swords, rifles, dirks, sabers, cannon balls and bullets. On the shelves were journal upon journal, written in a clear, minute hand, which described war as the greatest game of all.

Listening to the old soldiers in the region was a concomitant pleasure. Had Paul-Alain been six or seven instead of four, he might have attached himself to one of the old ruins who strode about remembering battles and commands, the details of which had been blurred by hundreds of other accounts heard in so many barracks and bars. Wusterwitz was a vast outdoor old soldiers' home, and a vaster young soldier's pasture.

To counteract the influence of the military atmosphere, each Friday night Paule would pass on to her son the lore her father had so carefully told her about the honor and valor of the Jews.

“One thousand years ago there was a great scholar in France called Rashi, whose full name was Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki. He was born in Troyes, which is not far from Paris, in 1040. He studied in Germany, just as you will study in Germany, then returned to Troyes, where he founded a school of his own. There were ten thousand Gentiles and only one hundred Jews in Troyes, and Rashi's school was attended by Jewish scholars from all over the world. No gulf of hostility separated Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages; Rashi sang the hymns of the Church, he taught the local priests Hebrew melodies, and he translated French lullabies into Hebrew. He told the story of the passages of the Talmud in the language of Troyes of his day with warmth and scholarship; his style had such wit and elegance that it seemed as though the original Hebrew was French. Rashi's children became teachers and his grandchildren became teachers, and when he finished his work it was sung by all the rabbis that the Talmud had at last been completed.”

Hansel's aide-de-camp telephoned from the Bendlerstrasse early one afternoon in February and explained carefully that Hansel would arrive at Wusterwitz the following morning. Gretel tried to learn more, though her experience told her this would be impossible. She had thought Hansel was still in Italy, and she sensed trouble because he had not telephoned himself.

Hansel arrived just after lunch on the afternoon of February 4th. Haggard, he tumbled out of the staff car, embraced Gretel and Paule gratefully, and let them lead him into the house so they could close the doors and hear what had happened.

He took off his huge coat, poured himself a stiff whiskey, and stood with his back to the fire. The women did not prompt him; they could feel the trouble like electricity in the air.

“Has the news gotten here yet?”

“Dear Hansel, what news?”

“Hitler has brought down not only his very own von Blomberg but the army's own von Fritsch as well.”

“Hansel!”

“And hardly a man—except for Beck, Stuelpnagel, Adam, myself, and a few others—has even so much as protested.”

“But
why?'

Hansel snorted. “Keitel is the new Chief of Staff of something called the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Keitel!”

Gretel's face showed her disgust. “You must tell us the whole story, Hansel dear. This is a catastrophe.”

“Horrible story.” He knocked the whiskey back. “You see, Blomberg and a woman named Erna Gruhn were married last month. It was very quiet, but Hitler and Goering were witnesses. It was hardly reported in the press, von Stuelpnagel tells me. She is far below Blomberg's class, but how far—well, no one dared to guess.”

“A scandal?”

“My God, what a scandal. Count Helldorf, the Police President of Berlin, was embarrassed to find certain dossiers of the Frau Feldmarschall's past life. Helldorf is inclined to be a Nazi, no doubt about that, but he was an officer of hussars first, and he still retains a certain devotion to the military tradition. He knew that if Himmler got the dossier he would never stop blackmailing the army. According to regulations, the dossier should have gone to Himmler, but instead Helldorf took it to Blomberg's closest associate—to Blomberg's own relative, Keitel. And can you guess what Keitel did with these dreadfully incriminating papers?”

“He burned them?” Gretel asked tentatively.

“He passed them on to Hermann Goering!” Hansel shouted, his face grown scarlet.

“My God!”

“What is going to happen?” Paule asked. “Keitel hates Veelee.”

“It has already happened,” Hansel said. “Stuelpnagel called me in Italy and said that playful telephone calls were coming into the Bendlerstrasse from the whores in every restaurant and café up and down the Wilhelmstrasse, and that Goering had seen Hitler. Of course I came directly to Berlin.”

“Frau Feldmarschall von Blomberg had been … a whore?” Gretel asked with mounting horror.

“Oh, quite active, quite successful. And Hitler, that hypocrite who blandly pretends not to see the mountain of pederasts in the SA, became morally outraged. Blomberg must go, he cried. Everyone knew that Blomberg's only possible successor would be von Fritsch, our Commander in Chief and a representative of the old army—so Himmler at once produced evidence for his Fuehrer that Fritsch was a raving homosexual.”

“Fritsch?”
Gretel cried. “Preposterous!”

Over a day later Paule realized that perhaps her father had not been Gretel's lone stray moment.

“Of course preposterous,” Hansel said, “why, many's the time he and I—but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, they dredged up some male prostitute who lurks in public toilets for the Gestapo. He identified Fritsch as his client and Hitler—the filthy little blackmailer—demanded Fritsch's resignation in return for silence, but of course Fritsch would not resign. He demanded a court-martial, but Hitler would have none of that and our Commander in Chief was sent off on indefinite leave.”

Paule watched the outrage of her friends with pity. Here was the end of their fantasy about controlling that pushy little politician. She sensed that Gretel realized what had happened to all of them, but it was obvious that Hansel had not the slightest inkling of the disaster. To him, it seemed to be a shocking matter which might happen once in a century in a gentlemen's club.

“And then what, Hansel,” his wife asked sharply.

“Gretel, I tell you it was like the day five years ago when von Schleicher came back to the Bendlerstrasse after Hitler had discharged him. We all were outraged, of course. The same men even spoke the same pieces. Beck took charge and said we must act at once to sweep this pigsty clean and restore the honor of the army. The very next day was the anniversary of the Kaiser's birthday, but everyone argued that we must not risk civil war, that aside from this rotten little affair of Blomberg and Fritsch, the Austrian corporal still danced to our tune. One of the more shocking things was that Fritsch—I mean, we have all regarded Fritsch as such a strong man, haven't we?—Fritsch fell to pieces. I mean to say, Beck doesn't have the stature; only Fritsch could have rallied all of us. But even while Beck was pleading with us, even while I myself was moved to stand beside first Beck, then von Stuelpnagel, and finally Adam—even then Fritsch had his pen in his hand and was writing out his resignation from the army.”

“Oh, Hansel! What a tragedy!”

The general shrugged. “I was shocked. Then von Brauchitsch said that all of us—including Fritsch—had better remember the oath of loyalty we had taken to the Fuehrer. From Reichenau I would have expected such a thing, but from Brauchitsch?”

“What are you going to do?”

“At least that is clear, my dear. The army has been dishonored, and if it will not defend itself against that little guttersnipe then he deserves to dominate them.”

“Them?” Gretel cried.
“Them?”

“I have resigned from the German Army.”

“Hansel. Oh, darling Hans, you are wonderful!” She rushed to him and hugged him.

“This is too big a thing for suicide,” he said, his chin thrust over Gretel's shoulder. “I told Fritsch that. I am proud of my country and I am proud of its army, but if every officer—at least every officer of field rank—does not resign before the announcement of these wretched changes, then I will feel shame for the army and dread for my country.”

Gretel was an army wife. “We must start with opposition,” she said excitedly, “then we can build resistance until we are strong enough for conspiracy.”

Paule watched these pathetic children at their games. “Has Veelee resigned?” she asked finally. Her arms trembled and she had to cross them tightly in front of her. This was not part of a game; she had heard Hitler and she believed him. He wanted to kill her and her son.

“I don't know if the news has reached Spain yet,” Hansel said slowly.

“Of course it has,” Gretel said, without thinking. “They must have known as fast as you in Italy.”