Stained Glass (9 page)

An endorsement of the amendment by Adenauer was not difficult to elicit, once the amendment was scheduled for a vote by the filing of the requisite number of signatures—easily collected by highly organized opponents of the Wintergrin movement. The grand old man, after all, was living reproof of the impetuosities of the young who had so thoroughly backed Hitler. Every line on his corrugated face reminded one of the wisdom that accumulates slowly, but ineluctably, like dust on wine bottles which, emptied too early, give only sullen satisfaction. At Wintergrin's age, Der Alte was running for member of the diet of the Rhine province.

Asked after his endorsement to explain the provision as afterthought to the constitution, Adenauer reminded the press that there had been ten amendments to the United States Constitution passed as afterthoughts—“the so-called Bill of Rights.”

Did he not see the amendment as designed primarily to stop the movement headed by Count Wintergrin?

Adenauer replied that the minimum-age requirement was, after all, statutory confirmation of what is widely accepted: that effective government requires a measure of experience. If it was indeed an oversight not to have written it into the constitution at the time of the convention, what better time to make amends than now? It would concededly have the effect of holding back Wintergrin, said Adenauer, but since he was opposed to the movement of Count Wintergrin, why should it be surprising that he Welcomed the incidental benefit of tabling Count Wintergrin's quixotic political campaign by means of an amendment that was intrinsically desirable? He doubted that Count Wintergrin, with the advantage of another five years' experience in politics, would renew undifferentiated and bellicose demands for the instant reunification of Germany, which goal he, Adenauer, and his party, the Christian Democrats, were pursuing in their own way, but with due regard for the realities.

The candidate Erich Ollenhauer, cautious about the popularity of Wintergrin with young voters whom he was himself wooing, conferred privately with his advisers and after several hours it was publicly announced that Herr Ollenhauer would not undertake, in a matter involving a constitutional amendment, to commit his party. The matter would be voted on, at a special party conference the following week.

“They will of course vote in favor, but this way Ollenhauer will not appear himself to be casting aspersions on youth. That's what they call having your cookie and eating it too, eh, Oakes?” Wintergrin sat on the stool, bent over Conditti's hulky chromoscope—an ingenious device invented by Conditti's father which permitted the viewer, while looking through the viewing port, to vary the intensity of the light by manipulating a lever with the right hand, and, with the left, to darken the color by interposing one or more colorless screens over the crystal being examined. The coordination of light and screening yielded a code number, translatable with considerable success by the crystallographers into glass of the desired quality. Sitting on the stool, head bent down, through the left viewing port Wintergrin inspected a shard of blue rescued from the north rose window. With his right eye he studied a diamond-shaped blue crystal, and adjusted the levers so as to attempt a perfect duplication. The blue, the magic solvent of the great stained windows, was always the root problem. “It isn't exactly 34-A, and not exactly 34-B. Is the shard perhaps too slender? Can we thicken it by adhering a second fragment?”

Blackford was taking notes.

“I'll check.”

“No,” said Wintergrin, bending down again over the viewing port and trying, a finer tuning with the control levers. “Our friends are not going to get away with this. I don't mind telling you, Oakes, that I welcome this move. It appears to be a smart move, but it isn't.”

“Oh?” said Oakes.

“Under the constitution, a proposed amendment is subjected to what they call the clarification process. If a clarification, with sufficient signatures, is deemed by the high court to be germane to the amendment, then the vote is on the original amendment
as clarified
.

“Next Monday, I will call on my followers to collect signatures for a clarification to the pending amendment which would deny the chancellorship to anyone under twenty-five—or over seventy-five.

“The court will find it very difficult to rule out this clarification as
ultra vires
to the question being put before the public.” Wintergrin almost laughed. His smile was broad.

“That will teach Der Alte. He is seventy-six.”

“Assuming you get the clarification fused with the amendment, what do you think will happen?”

“If the Adenauer people lose in the courts, they'll drop their support of the amendment, and only Ollenhauer's people will pull for it. It has to get a plurality of sixty per cent to be enacted. That would never happen with Adenauer and me in opposition.”

“I do not need to say”—Wintergrin sat up, taking out the sliver of blue glass and returning it neatly to its marked envelope—“that my analysis is confidential. I don't want to eliminate the surprise factor.”

“Of course,” Blackford said—as he reflected on which of the two standard means for communicating with his superior he should select to relay Wintergrin's confidence, and deciding there and then on the faster of the two. He thought as a precaution to say, “But surely somebody will figure out how you're going to maneuver?”

“In
fact
, no one has.” Wintergrin leaned back in one of the two chairs in Blackford's office in the north transept. Blackford studied him as Wintergrin turned once again to the chapel. When would the sketches for the choir stalls be completed? Had a mosaicist been contracted for? Had Overstreet completed his examination of the timbers and cross-bearings? Would scaffolding be necessary at the spring lines to do the stonework on the vaults?

It was as though St. Anselm's was his vocation, and his political career his hobby. But both were compulsions, Blackford knew. The intensity of effort coiled from a single spring. The restoration of the chapel was one with the restoration of the republic. Wintergrin loved them equally, would devote himself no less passionately to either. Blackford could see him drawing strength from his discussions of the chapel, every detail of which Axel had apparently assimilated from childhood. He talked about the afternoon of his seventh birthday when he had taken refuge in the chapel during a flash storm rather than run the one hundred yards to the castle, and had seen, as if for the first time, the windows in the south aisle wall lit up like displays in a jewelry store, how he stood transfixed when the storm suddenly ended, the sun emerged, and they brightened as if they would burst under the golden pressure. His eyes shone as he recalled the moment.

“Wait until you see the light they shed on the columns, Oakes. It will be many months, I know, but I promise you will not find them wasted.”

Blackford said impulsively, “Do you ever come in here to pray?”

Wintergrin looked at him, slowly straightening in his chair. “I believe in God,” he said. “And for that reason, I do not pray to Him to grant me favors. That way I am never disillusioned. I express gratitude to Him when I feel His blessings. I feel Him in this building. I am, here, wired in to the will of God.”

He rose, thanked Blackford formally (he always did, after every session, as though Blackford was a volunteer) and walked deliberately down the nave, past the narthex to the door, out through the porch to the courtyard, and to his castle.

The next morning at ten Adenauer was sitting in his office, tapping his fingers on his desk. He had himself taken the call from the high commissioner's office. Wintergrin would come out on Monday for a clarification to the amendment. The logic of the move, now that it was revealed, was instantly apparent. Wintergrin had outwitted them. Still … still, he thought, there might yet be ways to play it. Both he and Ollenhauer must now appeal jointly to the court. Perhaps that way they could keep the two constitutional proposals separate. He must persuade Ollenhauer that it would be dangerous to opportunize on Wintergrin's moves by backing the clarification maneuver. Adenauer was not comfortable, dealing directly with the other camp, so he called in an aide and dispatched him to Berlin to concert with Ollenhauer on strategy.

Black added a sentence to the scramble he had read into the telephone from the public pay booth at the Westfalenkrug opposite the inn. It said: “I NEED TO TALK TO SOMEBODY. CAN YOU ARRANGE IT?”

That night, in bed, he stared out the window and rehearsed the reasons why, in betraying Wintergrin, he was serving his country's interests. How does it go? he thought. If A—whose intentions are to confound X, even as B intends to confound X—adopts different tactics from B, who is being backed by C, how actively should C get in the way of A? Sufficiently to line up with X for that purpose?

Screw the diagrammatic approach. The fact of the matter was he felt dirty. Was he in a dirty business? He wished his old friend Anthony Trust were here, and that they could go out and drink and talk together. It was one thing to bring a British traitor to heel, another to ingratiate himself with someone as high-minded as anyone he had ever known—for the purpose of putting that man's confidences on a conveyor belt to his enemies. If it had not been for St. Anselm's, he suddenly realized, he would go bonkers, as they used to say at Greyburn. As it stood, if tomorrow he was discharged by his employers, he would instantly seek out employment in the rebuilding of St. Anselm's. He had come to yearn now to see it recreated. (Which reminded him. By the book, his cover was near-perfect. He
was
doing what he would actually like to be doing, assuming there had been no … connection.) Reading in the journal of the architect, he came across a passage in antique German:

“It is regrettably not possible to position the church at this latitude in such a way as to lengthen its season. But from about 18 May until about 24 October, the confluence of light, as seen by parishioners who occupy the easternmost three-fifths of the nave—the rear section will be deprived of the perspective necessary to the blend—will provide during the daylight hours the desired balance of blues, yellows, and reds, and the pilgrims will follow the story, so well laid out on glass by Herr Tissault, of St. Anselm's philosophical journey to paradise.” That, thought Oakes, was a medieval jam session. That was how they let themselves go. No ballistic-missile engineer cared more for the placement of his moving parts than Meister Gerard cared about the arrangement of the colors in St. Anselm's church. Blackford thought it truly miraculous that his involvement with the church had been entirely incidental to his reason for being in Germany. As finally he dropped off to sleep, he resolved he would join any movement primarily devoted to the reconstruction of St. Anselm's church. Come to think of it, he wondered: Was there an order of St. Anselm? He would be ready for it by the time he left Westphalia.

CHAPTER 8

The German high court agreed to hear arguments on the clarification proposal during the last week in September, so as to be able to rule in ample time to put the proposed amendment before the public, in final form, on election day, November 15. The pressures on the count were considerable, the comment indiscreet. One newspaper pointed out that if Adenauer at seventy-six was statutorily incompetent, why not also the members of the court appointed by him during his senility, which meant two-thirds. Opponents of clarification stressed the common-sense point that to argue that someone needed to be experienced in order to exercise the highest office in the land was not the equivalent of arguing that too much experience arbitrarily acquired at age seventy-five was
dis
qualifying. The young law professor who pleaded Wintergrin's clarification argument insisted that it was no more arbitrary to presume senescence at seventy-five than to presume immaturity at thirty-four. Wintergrin's strategy proved effective. By the time the judges were finished with their questions, it was clear that the pro-amendment forces desired the court to give them an
ad hominem
ruling in respect of Wintergrin, and an
ad rem
approach in respect of Adenauer.

And so the ruling came as no surprise. The clarification was ordered integrated into the amendment and listed on the ballot for plebiscitary action at the general election. Although in theory Wintergrin could be disqualified by ratification of the amendment, that disqualification would also extend to Adenauer. The day after the court's, ruling, the established German leaders, meeting with their advisers, pronounced the Wintergrin strategy dead. More important, so did Joseph Stalin, who spoke of another strategy as now necessary.

Returning to St. Anselm's from the week's political activity, Wintergrin went straight to the chapel, as was his custom, to see what progress had been made. He found Oakes translating Overstreet's instructions to two German masons whose assignment was to furrow onto the eight columns the stone traceries of the originals. They were to use a paste that would pick up some of the gold that came in through the windows as, the history insisted—and one or two of the pictures demonstrated—the original pillars had done. The question was to find the reflective element and insinuate it into the stone in just the right proportion. Too much would be, well, “too much,” said Blackford, happy to return to John-Jane-Gyp German, after so ambitious a passage in highly technical German. Wintergrin could not refrain from firing off in his virtuosic German a fresh translation, the precision of which Blackford admired, and said so, taking the opportunity to congratulate Wintergrin on his political victory, and despising himself on his hypocrisy: though he confessed he was not absolutely sure which side of him was the dissimulator, the one that congratulated Wintergrin, or the one that consoled Washington. Wintergrin thanked him matter-of-factly, looked expertly about the church, and noted ruefully that there had been little apparent progress over the preceding week. Blackford said that was correct; most of the week had been given over to experimentation and research, and to problems in carpentry in anticipation of a major effort to shore up the old structure. Wintergrin said he would look it all over in detail tomorrow as he planned to spend the entire weekend at St. Anselm's, and would Oakes by any chance be free to take dinner with him tonight—he would have along only his principal aide, Roland Himmelfarb, and his new assistant, a most attractive woman who had just joined his staff—Erika Chadinoff, the daughter of the renowned novelist and scholar, Dimitri Chadinoff. Oakes half-expected the invitation: Wintergrin had taken to asking Oakes to join him at the castle for dinner on the night of his weekly return to St. Anselm's, sometimes with one or more of his aides and friends, most of whom by now knew Oakes and spoke in his presence with candor; twice with Wintergrin alone, though on one of those occasions his mother had been present, and though Blackford had enjoyed the hour and a quarter devoted to the childhood triumphs of little Axel, grown-up Axel enjoyed it not at all, but was unable to restrain his premier fan. It was the only occasion on which Oakes had ever seen Wintergrin fail to assert his authority.